HD-ready HTPC (1 Viewer)

[OnkelChris]

Hey out there!

I'm going to build a HTPC for my parents... It should be able to play DVB-C HD and in the future perhaps BlueRay!
So far it's easy to go on, but what should I buy? AMD? Intel? ATI? NVIDIA? Hope you guys (and girls) can help me

My thoughts about it:

-> Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H HDMI
-> AMD Athlon64 X2 EE 4600+
-> 2x 1GB Infineon/Qimonda DDR2-800 RAM
-> 380W Seasonic Powersupply

!!!!!!! FloppyDTV Tunercard or Terratec Cinergy C with MCE Remote Kit ???????? Which one does the AC3 out?

I'm not sure if the board with the ATI 3200 chip is enough to do it... (My system specs are little bit older ^^)
Which codec do I need? PowerCinema 8? Does ATI a good job with MediaPortal on WindowsXP?

 

[huckster2]

The ATI chipset has proved to have problems with the Freeview HD transmissions here in New Zealand.

It will display them fine, but when you try to change channels from one format to another (720p to 1080i etc) it will succeed some of the time but then fail on others. Once it fails, things have to be restarted.

There have been many instances of people moving from ATI cards to NVidia (8500GT or better) as a consequence.

I am using CoreAVC's codec to get around this at the moment but this basically pushes the decoding onto the CPU (an AMD 2350 which seems to cope). Am keeping my fingers crossed that new drivers will resolve the problem, but my patience is running out.

 

[OnkelChris]

that's my problem... i can't trust ATI chipsets for this HTPC!

The deal is, that I want a motherboard with as much onboard as possible... The NVIDIA 8200 onboard would be a nice chip, but all the boards with it have no Firewire... but this is needed by the FloppyDTV

 

[OnkelChris]

ASUS M3N-H HDMI

I'm going on with this one... Some oppinions?

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Its got some nice touches, wonder how it reacts with the onboard sli option, does sound interesting.

Good luck with the build.