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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drealit" data-source="post: 380969" data-attributes="member: 70031">I honestly would get a very budget minded board (GA-MA74GM-S2 is only $50) and drop in a discrete card. The current IGP's don't offer enough (IMO) on both the HD and SD front. Most of the IGP's are great at handling HD material, some can do 24p, some can passthrough 7.1 channels etc... but NONE of them are up to snuff in terms of SD material. They are all lacking when it comes to post processing etc. (interlacing is finally almost under control but it is still no where near good enough). I had/have a 780G (Gigabyte) currently and am trading it out for the cheap 740G I mentioned above... why? Because I'm dropping in a Sapphire HD 4670 video card... why? Because currently it is one of the best rated devices for all the HTPC fronts, HD (including 24p etc.), SD (interlacing is very good, post processing is as good as or better than the rest), Audio is all there. The card I chose has a built in HDMI output that does both Video/Audio so that I don't need to use one of those special DVI/HDMI convertors... but it has a rather large fan on it. This is good because it stays very cool and is extremely quiet... the problem though is that it sacrifices one of my PCI slots... but I don't think I will be using it anyway!I was going to go the 9400 route as suggested above... but after a lot of research and chit chatting over at AVS I decided the discrete route was definitely the best way for me to go.Here is an amazing article that backs up most of my findings - <a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/media-playback.html" target="_blank">High-Definition PC Experience: Graphics Cards vs. High-Definition Video Playback - X-bit labs</a> it rates each of the chipsets (both ATI and Nvidia) and scores them in both HD and SD tests and analyzes the audio capabilities. It really gives you a nice mathematical run down and puts everything right in front of you so you can make a good educated decision. As I said it was important for me to not only have good HD playback (which most chipsets handle very well now) but also the SD front should be close to perfect.Because I chose to go the discrete route... I was able to cheap out on my motherboard and cpu and save a lot of money for close to the best HTPC performance I could by. My videocard cost me $70 the motherboard was $45 and my CPU (BE-2400) was only $25 when I bought it... that's $140 for BETTER performance than the 9400 based chipset (excluding the raw power of the e5200 CPU which I don't need for my HTPC since that's all it is) and costs a heck of a lot less (9400 motherboard is $130? CPU is like $70 I think). There's a lot for you to decide and I wish you the best of luck! I am very happy with my setup.... I can tell you that much! P.S. - If you want more power for your encoding etc (which I think you do)... you can drop in a beefy AMD Phenom 9600 Quad Core CPU (it's only $85 right now at Newegg). It's only 95W's considering it's power and encodes as quickly as my E8400 when I had it overclocked to 3.6Ghz (it's at 4ghz now and I haven't encoded anything with it). I have one of these CPU's currently in my Server 2008 computer and I use it for torrenting, encoding, SQL hosting etc.</blockquote>

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