High quality HTPC - onboard HDMI or video card

[PeterTaps]

Folks,

I am building a mini theater that can seat about 40 people. The media will be served from an HTPC running Ubuntu/VLC. Video output will be over HDMI 1.3a.

The new brand of A75 motherboards support AMD APU (CPU + GPU) and seem to have good graphics performance. However, I would appreciate your opinion on whether to go with such motherboards and use onboard HDMI for output or to go with perhaps a cheaper motherboard and get a good video card. Would like to limit the budget to around $250.

For A75-based motherboard, I was specifically looking at Gigabyte A75-D3H. It is available for about $85 after the discount.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards,
Peter

 

[Arkaign]

Fwiw, Anand reviewed Llano and said that it's still not 100% up to the task of equalling even low-end discrete cards for HTPC use.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective

"The AMD 6550D in the A8-3850 is much better than the Intel HD 3000 Graphics in video post processing quality. However, this leads to increased expectations like support for full post processing on Blu-ray videos. Unfortunately, the 6550D has a number of issues which prevent it from fulfilling the requirement."

So, better to end up using a 6670 or even 6570 low-profile card. Or NV if that's your preference.

As a bonus, you can also use a more flexible Socket 1155 build, will cost a little more to get USB3 and etc, but you'll have a platform that will at the very least be upgradable to IB 4C/8T, which is almost certainly more powerful than anything that will ever be released for FM1. Although of course if it remains purely for HTPC duties forever, this won't be an issue. In my experience though, boxes often get repurposed down the line, and the more capable they are, the easier that is.

Even a dual-core Pentium (SB-based), will be more than enough for the CPU side of things.