Best HDMI Out - Video + AUDIO for HTPC

[ianbergman]

Title sums it up -- searching zillions of forums, I've found some comments on HDMI-out solutions for HTPCs, but nothing "definitive."

For my HTPC, I'm looking to consolidate into one cable (HDMI) carrying both audio and video. For any number of reasons, this means I need to have a video card that is capable of delivering the best possible audio over the HDMI cable, without combining it in a receiver or other device outside of the PC.

Gaming is not necessary -- this is purely an HTPC.

Any comments? So far, all I know about are a few of ATI's higher end cards, but I haven't been able to find a single significant review of using them in an HTPC setting.

EDIT
Thanks everyone -- lots of information. It's a wild world out there of HTPC parts... I decided to go low end and grab an ATI 3450 ($40 AR at Fry's), which is doing a fine job of outputting HDMI and 2-channel audio. Now I just have to figure out how to get the 5.1 audio kicking in (in theory it does it ), and fix Cyberlink's POS BD-player software and we're good to go!

 

[Nemesis 1]

The 4000 series cards . Have everthing ya want and more . Follow links in the 4000seies thread.

 

[angry hampster]

Have you thought about just running an AMD chip with a 780G chipset?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Do you care about gaming, or just HD decoding?

newegg has at least one nv 8500 (MSI) with a digital in (includes cable to motherboard header) and HDMI out, that's an under-$100 option if you don't need gaming.

The ATI 3850s worry me: they have their own audio chip so no digital input is needed, but a google search turns up a lot of people having problems with the audio chip going silent.

With ATI you'll only get stereo for games (no Dolby Digital Live encoding). With nv the 8500 can take the 5.1 DDL output from a soundcard that has it.

(Both will pass through pre-encoded 5.1 from movies.)

 

[ianbergman]

thanks, this is super helpful. No gaming on this machine, and my attempts to use a receiver to do this are failing miserably (i'm an idiot, so I bought a cheap HDMI pass-through receiver that doesn't do any HDMI audio. God bless returns). I'm on a mission today, so I'm going to go see if I can find the nv8500 at Fry's instead of waiting a couple of days for NewEgg.

@ Nemesis -- I'd love a next-generation ATI card, but I understand the 4000s are weeks to months away yet? I'll check out the threads...

 

[hans007]

i highly doubt the HD decode or sound ar emuch different from the 3000 series to 4000 series. they seem to just have doubled the number of shader units and texture units in the 4000 series.


so your best bet if you just want hdmi out with digital audio all in one, probably a 3450 if you dont care about gaming.

the 2400 might even work, but its slightly higher power.

 

[themisfit610]

Remember that just having HDMI doesn't mean it can bitstream out all the audio tracks. A lot of HDMI outputs are still connected to SPDIF, which means you can't send PCM, DTS-MA, or TrueHD without re-encoding them to Dolby Digital or DTS on the fly. I don't know of a "true" HDMI output yet.

~MiSfit

 

[ther00kie16]

780G will only do 2 channel lossless over hdmi so if you want surround lossless, 780g won't do. nvidia 8200 will do it though.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: ther00kie16
780G will only do 2 channel lossless over hdmi so if you want surround lossless, 780g won't do. nvidia 8200 will do it though.

8200 AMD mATX motherboard with -no- video card could be a very good option (MSI = $80 at newegg) if you haven't built the HTPC yet, but I haven't read up on how its HD decoding and audio will compare to a discrete card.

preview

 

[ther00kie16]

8200 and 780g HD capabilities are almost even. 780g has the advantage in graphics performance for games.

 

[stepone]

ATI 3XXX cards/780g will only output 2.0 pcm audio & ac3 5.1.
The new 4850/4870 has a new hd video processor & improved hdmi audio which should offer 7.1 pcm audio over the new 1.3 hdmi port. That will be available from the 16th of June.

However you may want to wait until the end of July/begining of august as this is when the 4450/4650 launch & they'll be more suited to a htpc.