final components for HTPC

[suprateep]

thanks guys for all the help.

I came to the option of using the Gigabyte 78GM-s2H series motherboard for onboard sound and music for the time being. Later upgrade to a true HD model.

BTW I have a Creative 5.1 Live Platinum in my older desktop - any ideas if that can be hooked up. Its a PCI based card with a spdif output. Is it better to hook this up or use the onboard soundcard.

 

[thevortex]

thanks guys for all the help.

I came to the option of using the Gigabyte 78GM-s2H series motherboard for onboard sound and music for the time being. Later upgrade to a true HD model.

BTW I have a Creative 5.1 Live Platinum in my older desktop - any ideas if that can be hooked up. Its a PCI based card with a spdif output. Is it better to hook this up or use the onboard soundcard.

Well, almost any standalone sound card would be better than the onboard sound option. But do try it out and see how you like it. And I am not sure about this but does not the Gigabyte mobo itself say that it supports HD Audio and Video? Anything lacking in that?

 

[moserw]

thanks guys for all the help.

I came to the option of using the Gigabyte 78GM-s2H series motherboard for onboard sound and music for the time being. Later upgrade to a true HD model.

BTW I have a Creative 5.1 Live Platinum in my older desktop - any ideas if that can be hooked up. Its a PCI based card with a spdif output. Is it better to hook this up or use the onboard soundcard.

Agree with thevortex here. Any external sound card will beat the default Realtek anyway. Just make sure you have a PCI slot available in the Gigabyte motherboard. Most are moving to PCI-Express these days.

 

[suprateep]

Agree with thevortex here. Any external sound card will beat the default Realtek anyway. Just make sure you have a PCI slot available in the Gigabyte motherboard. Most are moving to PCI-Express these days.

There is a PCI slot (2 actually) in the gigabyte - the HD video is good with onboard ATI (3200) while the Onboard SC can transmit digital audio through optical. I was thinking whether this would be better than the spdif connection provided on the Creative Live 5.1

 

[moserw]

There is a PCI slot (2 actually) in the gigabyte - the HD video is good with onboard ATI (3200) while the Onboard SC can transmit digital audio through optical. I was thinking whether this would be better than the spdif connection provided on the Creative Live 5.1

Technically there should not be any difference, but as you will read in a lot of forums and over the internet that this is not necessarily true. Since you already have a card and if a slot is available in the MB then use it. Creative will be better one feels.

 

[illusion]

OK I have repeated this ad nauseam. Playing any kind of video is not a load on a machine with AMD or Intel dual core processors with a minimum of 1 GB of RAM. Be it Blu Ray or othewise.

Indeed when you spend for a graphics card you expect for it to share the load! But, is the trade off worth it when you consider the heat, noise and internal clutter within the case? That is what one must consider.

If the HTPC is serious about music, then a graphics card is not an option at all. There is an article called 'Art of building a HTPC' - please google it. It is related to the use of cMP as an audio player. Hope this helps.

Partly agree with vortex here. But I think what vortex missed out on was that there are many passively cooled graphics card ( the one with huge heatsinks) which perform no noise . The only setback here is that these passively cooled cards cannot be overclocker to achieve higher fps in games. As suprateep here is not interested in gaming then a passively cooled card is the way to go.


Suprateep I strongly will advise you to go for a passively cooled ATI card. The reason for the same being that I have done a lot of research on HTPC for quite some time now . I went thru a lot of forums and many people debated wether a dedicated graphics card was required or not. Everybody have their own views on this . But there was this posted which said that since a graphics card takes off quite some load of the cpu, hence the cpu was running cooler.

Ok this is what I did today. I played a normal 720p mkv file and i saw that the cpu load on my core 2 duo 2.13 was around 35 - 40% . I dont have a graphics card . Now a Blu Ray will generate much higer usage and may even end up taking 70- 80% of the cpu resource depending on the strength of the cpu. If a cpu would constantly run for 5 hours at 70 % utliization the heat generation would be phenomenal and especially more so in warm/hot climates like India has.High heat generation will lower the life of your cpu greatly. Decent graphic cards are available at the 5k range which is worth every penny of your investment. Just my two cents here.

 

[gobble]

The 780G runs 1080p with 45 - 50% cpu on a 2.1ghz dual core. I use a 45W TDP BE-2350 cpu so power/heat is even less. If you go the htpc route, look for a 45nm cpu with low TDP/heat values. The rev1.0 of ga-ma780-s2h has a slight overheating problem which was corrected in rev 1.1 mobo. So make sure you get 1.1 or higher rev.

Also I read somewhere that new ATI drivers are on the horizon that will offload both render and decoding of HD video to GPU. This means cpu will drop to 5% utilization.

No idea when this is likely to happen, hopefully by last quarter of this year.

Cheers

 

[illusion]

The 780G runs 1080p with 45 - 50% cpu on a 2.1ghz dual core. I use a 45W TDP BE-2350 cpu so power/heat is even less. If you go the htpc route, look for a 45nm cpu with low TDP/heat values. The rev1.0 of ga-ma780-s2h has a slight overheating problem which was corrected in rev 1.1 mobo. So make sure you get 1.1 or higher rev.

Also I read somewhere that new ATI drivers are on the horizon that will offload both render and decoding of HD video to GPU. This means cpu will drop to 5% utilization.

No idea when this is likely to happen, hopefully by last quarter of this year.

Cheers

Ok as far as I know all ATi Cards have UVD ( Unified Video Decoder ) which take the entire load off CPU and do the video decoding themselves. This drops the load of the cpu to 8-10% which is fairly acceptable I think.


Going for a 45m dia based cpu will surely lower his power consumption as well as heat generation but again that is a tad more expensive than its 65nm dia predecessors. Instead of investing on the better 45nm dia one is better off to go for a 65nm dia processor (like my E6400) and invest the balance moolah in a graphics card here.

 

[gobble]

Ok as far as I know all ATi Cards have UVD ( Unified Video Decoder ) which take the entire load off CPU and do the video decoding themselves. This drops the load of the cpu to 8-10% which is fairly acceptable I think.


Going for a 45m dia based cpu will surely lower his power consumption as well as heat generation but again that is a tad more expensive than its 65nm dia predecessors. Instead of investing on the better 45nm dia one is better off to go for a 65nm dia processor (like my E6400) and invest the balance moolah in a graphics card here.

I got my 2.1ghz 45nm dual core cpu for rupees 2500/- a year back.

You are talking about the phenom cpus that are tri-core and quad core that still consume 65W TDP.

AMD's Athlon X2 BE-2350 processor - The Tech Report - Page 1

There are two different beasts.

Cheers

 

[gobble]

PS: UVD is not yet offloading decode/render completely from cpu. Like I said the drivers are yet to come.

The 780G and all 7xx gpus have UVD2 which is what you need.

Cheers

 

[kannanokannan]

Guys, this must be a relatively old article chk out
AnandTech: HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer '07
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977&p=8
Good video processing not purely dependent on GPU power..
like... if you connect a large monitor will take heavy toll on the GPU memory too..
chk this card Theitdepot - POV GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 PCI E Graphic Card these guys ship allover India.. i had a good experience with them...
cheers,
kannan

 

[illusion]

I got my 2.1ghz 45nm dual core cpu for rupees 2500/- a year back.

You are talking about the phenom cpus that are tri-core and quad core that still consume 65W TDP.

AMD's Athlon X2 BE-2350 processor - The Tech Report - Page 1

There are two different beasts.

Cheers

Dual Core ?? Ok I thought you meant Core 2 Duo! I agree Dual Core CPU are cheaper than Core 2 Duo's any day cause they are nothing but stripped down versions of Core 2 Duos. Dual Cores are not that efficient . We have Dual Cores in our office machines and not one days goes by when we dont curse it for its slow speeds. In fact we tried playing a 720p wmv file in the Office Dual Core and the CPU consumption was a whopping 60-65% !! I guess the Core 2 Duos in my Home PC and Desktop have spoiled me .


By Dual Core I thought you were referring to Core 2 Duo here . My Bad.

 

[illusion]

PS: UVD is not yet offloading decode/render completely from cpu. Like I said the drivers are yet to come.

The 780G and all 7xx gpus have UVD2 which is what you need.

Cheers

Agree with you here cause as I stated earlier the CPU shows the usage as 8-10% down from 40 -50% in setups without an ati card. But 8-10% CPU usage is within acceptable limits I think, cause if suprateep waits for the New 7xx series to come out he will have to may a much higher premium price around its launch which is not justifiable and it will take a good 6 months before the prices come down .


Please note that I personally don't have an ATI Graphics card. All the views above are based on the Online Reviews of Graphics Card in many hundred forums out there.

 

[spirovious]

Chip mag also said in earlier issue that GC helps to reduce CPU load reasonably.

 

[suprateep]

Chip mag also said in earlier issue that GC helps to reduce CPU load reasonably.

it does actually for some the software that makes good use of it. Take the case of say Nvidia pure cinema software (read somewhere) playing a hi def file, the cpu utilization was 10-12% as the GPU was sharing the load whereas a rip played by WMP the CPU utilization surged upto 50-60%. Talk about that.

Anyway so I have decided my HTPC will not look like a slim VCR - would be a zebronics procube.

 

[illusion]

it does actually for some the software that makes good use of it. Take the case of say Nvidia pure cinema software (read somewhere) playing a hi def file, the cpu utilization was 10-12% as the GPU was sharing the load whereas a rip played by WMP the CPU utilization surged upto 50-60%. Talk about that.

Anyway so I have decided my HTPC will not look like a slim VCR - would be a zebronics procube.

IS this the product :-

Products - Pro Series, Computer Cabinets, Keyboards, Mouses, Power Supplies, Speakers, Web Cameras, Jet, Hawk, Shivaji, Antibiotic


Why not try the Spark & Dragster series with a cool blue LCD display ?

 

[venkatcr]

Silverstone HTPC cases are now available from The IT Depot. (Theitdepot - Computer/Cabinets). Silvertsone cabinets have multiple fan/fan bays with a assured noise level of less than 20dB. They all have 7 expansion bays, with 2 to 4 external bays for optical drives.

They are expensive at ITDepot, unfortunately.

Cheers

 

[thevortex]

Folks, I hate to repeat myself But see all that I am saying is for a true HTPC. Not a multitasking general use computer. Why are we worried about 30 or 35 percent of CPU being utilized when playing a video?? What else are we going to do on our HTPC when the video is being played?

And what difference do you find in the video quality if any when you play it off a motherboard like the Gigabyte one being discussed here?

If you see a difference in video quality with the dedicated GPU, then well, close your eyes and go for it. CPU utilization figures are passe', really. That is, if you are looking at setting up a true HTPC and not use it for multitasking.

All this apart, I strongly recommend members to take a look at an article titled 'The Art of building computer transports'. This is available on Audio Asylum. Adding resource intensive and heat producing units such as a display card within the confines of a HTPC is not the best way to go if you want to setup a HTPC with the highest importance given to audio quality. Lesser the internal components, lesser the heat generated and hence lesser noise. That is, in my opinion, the key to a HTPC setup focussed on musicality.

 

[venkatcr]

All this apart, I strongly recommend members to take a look at an article titled 'The Art of building computer transports'. This is available on Audio Asylum.

Bala, do you have the exact link to this article. I am not bale to locate it for some reason.

Cheers

 

[venkatcr]

All this apart, I strongly recommend members to take a look at an article titled 'The Art of building computer transports'. This is available on Audio Asylum.

Bala, do you have the exact link to this article. I am not able to locate it for some reason.

Cheers