Micro ATX board for htpc, with lga 1151 support

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Hi Thanks for reading.

I am wanting to purchase a new micro atx motherboard for building a home theatre pc. I have a 6th-generation Intel LGA1151 processor and would like a mobo which accepts this. Also a reliable board. My last mobo died and took the hard drive with it and I lost 8 TB of data, still smarting over that.

Also do you know of there is any advantage to purchasing a gaming board, they seem to use more power and have higher specs, but does it have any meaning for improving htpc. I heard asus mobos are good so am leaning towards them but will welcome any mobo recommendations. I have an asus stxII soundcard to reproduce the audio, and for the picture i am hoping to use the mobo's built in solution, do you know of any mobos with a good graphics adaptor.

So I need: 1. micro atx motherboard 2. 6th-generation Intel LGA1151 processor support 3. High reliability 4. Good graphics adaptor 5. Budget is £200

Many thanks.
 
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You wont really benefit from a Z170 board vs a H110 board here for HTPC. You're best off just getting a £30 H110 board second hand. Buying a new board for old gen just isn't worth it here as you're not overclocking or looking for additional features. It's a false economy due to the age/discontinued nature of Skylake processor.

The graphics processing is primarily done on the CPU btw, the board is just a bridge for it.

Backing up your drives (twice) is really your best bet than chancing a 'good quality' board. Some die, some go on forever. Are you sure it was the board that killed your HDD and the real culprit is the PSU?
 
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Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

Are you saying a basic board like the H110 is good enough for htpc, and there will be no benefit from buying a higher spec board or gaming board?

Also is there any benefit from buying a modern cpu and motherboard, ditching the old stuff i have, is there anything in the new tech that can benefit htpc.

Also is a graphics card necessary as i take hdmi out to an external screen, so is it the screen that determines picture quality?
 
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Are you saying a basic board like the H110 is good enough for htpc, and there will be no benefit from buying a higher spec board or gaming board?

Also is there any benefit from buying a modern cpu and motherboard, ditching the old stuff i have, is there anything in the new tech that can benefit htpc.

Also is a graphics card necessary as i take hdmi out to an external screen, so is it the screen that determines picture quality?

A H110 board is fine if it provides what you need it to, you could have had a H110 board previously even. Gaming boards aren't really specific as such, they're just named "gaming" for marketing.

If your computer is struggling, then a upgrade could be good. The 530 HD graphics do support many current codecs, but i'm not fully knowledgeable on this. It is supposed to support h.265/HEVC which i believe is currently the best, but again i don't know what online services use for compression and what you're using for your movies, as you mentioned 8tb of data. The 6500T is a mobile CPU, so it's not powerful, but adequate depending on what you need, which is the key question. And were you happy with it before?

Performance can come down to overall computer hardware also, depending on codec being used. What software you are using will also dictate ability to upscale too. The screen will play a significant role in providing a good picture, again another rabbit hole you have to go down for finding the best visual experience for your needs, typically for movies a TV will be best bang for buck vs a monitor.

A dedicated graphics card will help, but it'll depend on what you are comparing it to. GPUs are silly expensive right now, however you only need a basic one that has good codec support. But you can get the similar performance from integrated graphics i suspect, this will be especially true with AMD's offerings (gaming wise they are very good!), they are way ahead of Intel in this department.

You will ideally want to find out your whole spec. You could be running DDR3 or DDR4 (i think Intel Skylake 6*** still supported DDR3). So you could possibly reuse the RAM if you opted for an upgrade.

Maybe asking in the general hardware section will net better response, this area is quite quiet.
 
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