4 out of 5 stars! Excellent Board 2010-01-27Used this board to build a new HTPC, with great results. Also used was an Athlon-II-250 (3GHz) and 2GB of DDR3-1333 RAM for the basic system. Major expansion is a Fusion 7 HDTV tuner card from DVICO. PC now serves as HDTV tuner/recorder, DVD player, and other video player.
Pros:
- HTPC is pretty low power, about 50 watts idling, so was able to be kept very cool and quiet, even with stock CPU fan. It's actually drawing about 10-15% less power than my previous HTPC (Shuttle SN95G5v2 with Opteron 170), but it runs much faster with less problems. AMD's C&Q works with this combination, where it did not with the Shuttle/Opt170. That's a problem with the Shuttle's BIOS, since Shuttle stopped supporting that model a few years ago. At full speed, this combination takes much less power than the Shuttle did.
- On board GPU did excellent job of decoding H263 and H264 (mpeg4) videos. But still not sure about mpeg2 videos; they play fine, but do not appear to be getting much GPU assist.
Cons:
- A little more costly than others of similar capabilities.
- The GPU by default takes away 256MB of system RAM. Forcing this to zero causes the HDTV programs to stutter, so I had to give some back; it's now set to 128MB. This is odd, since the board has its own 128MB of side-port RAM specifically for graphics operations. The other odd thing is that now the HDTV player takes over 500MB of RAM to run, whereas it only needed about 10% of that in the Shuttle (both running the same version of WXP, but different video processors and drivers). So in all, the system took over 700MB of RAM to run the HDTV player. Fortunately, I have 2GB in this system, but it could have been a problem in the Shuttle, which only had 1GB. I haven't figured this out yet, but it looks like it's only happening with the HDTV player, as other players (Media Player Classic) are not sucking up the RAM like this.
- This may be another software issue, but the Shuttle allowed the HDTV player to send its audio through the regular analog 2-channel out and the SP/DIF out at the same time. On this board it's only one or the other, which required switching the output in the HDTV player depending on whether I was using the TV's speakers or using the surround audio system for sound reinforcement. Other video applications seem to be playing out both simultaneously, so it may be just the HDTV player again.
- Only 2 fan headers; CPU fan header can handle standard 3 pin or 4 pin PWM fans, and does automatic speed control based on CPU temperature. However, system fan header can only be set to fixed speeds in BIOS. AMD's overdrive application can set both to full auto, but needs to be done manually after boot up or coming out of sleep; could not find a way to automate this. Fortunately, the system fan running at 50% (the lowest fixed speed) is quiet enough that it's not a problem.
- The rear I/O shield prevented SP/DIF optical plugs from fully plugging into socket; had to cut it open a little to allow solid connection.
I haven't tried using the HDMI yet, so I don't know about the capabilities of sending HD audio out that path.
-- Mountain Dewd Pasadena, CA