HTPC Motherboard

rubberduck · 2 Jul 2008 at 13:38

Hi

Am thinking about a cheap HTPC and was wondering how the Abit A-N78HD (GeForce 8200 chipset) compares to the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H. The Geforce 8200 looks like a winner but I can't find a review of it anywhere!

crazyDAJT · 8 Jul 2008 at 00:36

nope, the 780G is going to be the winner for a HTPC setup, as it has onboard decoding of HD media. you can get away with less than a 2Ghz chip which means your total price (for motherboard and CPU) is going to be about £80 tops.

and that would actually be overkill

rubberduck · 8 Jul 2008 at 11:46

Only problem I can see with it is that it doesn't have SPDIF out.

AbsenceJam · 8 Jul 2008 at 12:07

What board are you looking at that lacks S/PDIF? I doubt that any lack it.

8200 has the advantage of 7.1 LPCM via HDMI whereas with 780G the HDMI audio is only S/PDIF. 780G has better video quality though and the 8200 audio is downsampled because there's no protected audio path. I can definitely recommend the 780G (Gigabyte MA78GM is nice), combined with a 45 X2 4050e you get a nice little HTPC. There's currently no solution for proper HDMI audio anyway.

There are some nice MiniITX versions of both chipsets btw.

rubberduck · 8 Jul 2008 at 12:40

Was looking at the Abit A-N78HD.... Looks like a good board but I think it lacks SPDIF

AbsenceJam · 8 Jul 2008 at 12:50

Apparently there's an Asus bracket that will work to give that board S/PDIF if you must go the 8200 route.

andy_n64 · 8 Jul 2008 at 16:06

if its not got any spdif then there may be spdif headers on the board it self you can conenct one upto, alternativly you could always buy a cheap ass sound card that has spdif on it? with it being a digital connection I doubt that the cheapness and quality of the actual soundcard will affect the signal.