What MOBO for HTPC?

Django x2

Django x2

Django x2

Soldato
Joined
28 Sep 2008
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About 18 months ago, I bought an Asus P5Q-EM for an HTPC. It was about £90 and even now they seem to demand a premium.

It plays everything I throw at it through it's G45 chipset and onboard HDMI, but, that aside, if you had the money what board would you buy nowadays?
 
I just moved my htpc to a 785g based board and having not used AMD for a couple of years i have to say it is a wonderful low watt chipset for htpc duties.

Coupled with a low watt x2 250 chip and an Intel V SSD inside a Silverstone Shugo S02 i have a quite powerful setup that has hardware h264/vc-1/mpeg2 decoding onboard with all of the Avivo post processing filters - with zero noise and a SFF.

Board + chip cost like £100 ....clocks to 3.4 on 1.2v with 20c temps so still has plenty of grunt for avisynth mpeg2 scaling also.
 
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if I was buying a standard atx then always the msi 770-c45. Coupled with the new x2 240e amd chip and a passive 5450 ati card it destroys any hd source for very low power consumption.
 
im using an ion based board i got from MM best thing i got if im honest. gave my old matx c2d htpc to me brother it was more powerful but for just playing music, slideshowing family pics and watching films/tv shows it was over kill and lot more noisey
 
Azra said:
if I was buying a standard atx then always the msi 770-c45. Coupled with the new x2 240e amd chip and a passive 5450 ati card it destroys any hd source for very low power consumption.
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The 'e' chips are identical to the 240/250 infact they're on average probably worse clockers, you may as well save some dosh and undervolt yourself with the better chips.

And why bother with a 5450? it's still crap for gaming and uses more power than a 780/785 based board with identical hardware decoding. If you want to game you need something much more powerful and if you don't it's overkill for decoding duties.
 
I use a Asus P5N7A-VM nforce 730i board with GF9300 IGP with an E5300 @3GHz. pretty much flawless and really runs very low powered and all off of a 120w itx psu. I paid £90 for it november time, the most ive ever spent on a Matx board.
 
And why bother with a 5450? it's still crap for gaming and uses more power than a 780/785 based board with identical hardware decoding. If you want to game you need something much more powerful and if you don't it's overkill for decoding duties.
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Depends upon your definition of gaming. If you mean Crisis etc then yes you are right. But this will happily play WOW / EVE etc and such like and as the MB can be had for as little as £42 makes a powerful little combination.
 
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