HTPC (Home Theatre PC)

[droid]

what do you think of Intel DP35DPM for htpc mobo? or should i go for gigabyte?

[muzikfreakah]

Well that board only has an Optical audio out, but if your amplifier supports optical input then,yes that board should more than enough
Of course, if you are just going to use computer speakers, then digital out is not necessary which makes this board ok also.

Ang important lang gyud is the video card, atleast 2-4G of ram in Dual channel mode and a dual core or quad core proc above 2.0 gig

[droid]

yup, gonna connect it to a denon receiver. i'm concerned with the performance between the two.
i'm planning to go 4gb ram + quad if budget permits, else just go dual core

[muzikfreakah]

If you are not planning to overclock the intel should do just fine. Specs wise they are just about the same of course gigabyte uses solid caps which makes your system last longer when overclocking or not, but Intel still is known for good quality boards.

[droid]

ok thanks for the inputs

[supacheap]

anybody tried nvidia's purevideo? i am able to playback a pure 1080p video on a pentium 4 .. pretty impressive.

i dont own a rig but i work for a company that does. i have put together 4 3500 lumens DLP projectors stacked together to output on a 500 inch screen. i use a regular core 2 duo PC from lenovo and just slapped the fastest HDMI card I can find in the market. the 4 projectors are fed by an HDMI splitter and its a pain to align. anyway once its aligned, you can service the projectors with its quick release mounts from Chief Mounts. the output is pure 1080p (1920x1080) at 16x9 aspect ratio. without nvidia's pure video, the judder is noticeable when there are fast movements on the video. purevideo offloads the processing of the video from the CPU to the video card the result is just smooth output. from a blu-ray disc conversion would be 10Mbps bitrate/1080p/24fps/ac-3 audio/ DIVX-HD or WMV-HD.

in conclusion, with Nvidia Purevideo you can output smooth quality HD video with cheaper hardware.

[muzikfreakah]

Purevideo is good, but you need to have a good proc to go with it, ATI leads in the category of video decoding. since it can process the video ont he card itself offloading the proc and all ati VCs have native audio out on DVI to HDMI converter and Nvidia doesn't. But thats the only difference, if you have a dual core proc and lots of mem, nvidia should be very good indeed

[joco_ph]

Well Villman is know to have higher priced items than usual, pero naa gyud sila stock pirmi. Try calling TTI daw here sa cebu

will do...thanks bro.

[simoko]

bro Ryan here's my HTPC that i'm slowly building...pls. tell me unsa ako kulang ani:
-Trendsonic Wizard FC-Wi09A casing
-Zalman 400A-APF noiseless power supply
-Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H mboard
-Athlon X2 6400+ Black Edition(slightly OC @3.8GHz) w/ Gigabyte Neon 8-BL CPU cooler
-Patriot Extreme Performance DDR2-800 2x2GB
-320GB Seagate Barracuda SATA
-external DVD writer - HP brand
-ATI HD2600XT video card
-Samsung LCD TV w/ HDMI port
-Viewsonic LCD monitor naka DVI karon
-Altec Lansing VS3251
-Intex TV Tuner w/remote
-Typhoon brand FM radio(external via serial port)

[muzikfreakah]

E sir! Well you already have everything you need to run your media center.

May I recommend lang:
- You will need an HTPC remote so you would not need to keep standing up and down to control your media Most HTPC remotes can be configured with your TV Tuner already so you will just need 1 remote nalang
- LG Super Multi Blu Optical Drive (Capable of reading/buring Blu ray and reading HD DVD, and everything else a normal DVDrw drive would do)

Non essential but would be nice to have if you are really an HTPC fan:
- HTPC casing
- VFD Screen (To know whats playing even if your LCD is off, example you're just running an mp3 playlist)
- More Hard drive space