HTPC board - do i need the h.264 hardware acceleration offered by 8300/9300 nvidia chipsets?

[khodges]

I'm looking to put together a new build for a friend of mine. The system will serve as a sort of hub in his home theater area.

With his current setup, he plays Blu Rays on his PS3, and often streams divx content to his PS3/360 (acting as a media center extender/front end), which is attached to his projector.

The new PC would essentially serve as a better divx storage/hosting solution than his current crummy laptop, and would add a full fledged PC to his living room. His only current system is the aging laptop.

He will not be playing Blu Ray discs on the PC itself. He does have a nice surround system that i'm sure he'd like to correctly attach to the PC.

I plan on pairing the MB with either an X2 5200 (or something similar) or a E5200 c2d

I've been narrowing down potential motherboards, and was wondering if someone could shed some light on the whole h.264 hardware acceleration situation.

im looking to keep costs as low as possible, and have looked at a number of motherboards that utilize IGPs.

Apparently the newer NVIDIA chipsets (8200, 8300, 9300) offer hardware H.264 acceleration. Is this acceleration only beneficial to Blu Ray playback - i.e. - a disk spinning in the installed Blu Ray drive (which he will not have)? or does this acceleration come into play when decoding ripped videos (h.264 content) he may have stored on his hard drive? and with a relatively decent processor, is this even an issue?

If the hardware acceleration is only of benefit when spinning a BD, im tempted to go with a cheaper nvidia 8100/intel g31 board.

i like the look of this JetWay nvidia 8100 board, as it is cheap and contains a spidf out (which will make the surround sound config/connection easier, correct?)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813153121

however, i dont think the 8100 chipset provides the aforementioned acceleration

so, to sum up this way to lengthy post, how crucial is the hardware accel provided by the better IGPs?

 

[Binky]

If he's not going to play anything on the PC itself, then it's just a glorified NAS. The video capabilities would only be relevant if he's plugging in a TV/monitor and piping the signal out of the actual computer.

If I were building this, I would assume that he will be connecting it to a TV at some point in the future. This rules out the G31. I would also put low noise as a top consideration. Look at the AMD 780G boards with one of the low-power CPU's (like the 4850e or 5050e).

I really can't answer anything about the h264 decoding.

 

[khodges]

Yeah, to a degree its a glorified NAS, but it will also become his primary PC, replacing the laptop. From time to time, i could see him downloading some higher quality vid content that he would end up playing directly off the hard drive (x.264 mkv files etc), as i dont think the ps3/360 are crazy about streaming more exotic file formats. Just wondering if the hardware decoding is necessary.

 

[imported_Scoop]

Pretty much the only thing the 'highend' IGPs are good for is HD-playback with a lowend CPU. Any dualcore CPU will play SD stuff without problems.

 

[mindless1]

Whether you have any HD acceleration working at all depends on what playback software you're using. Whether it's important to have HD acceleration depends on how slow the CPU is. Generally a modern low end dual core CPU with minimal things happening in the background can decode HD h.264/etc, though I can't put my finger on an exact MHz per model but we could say any of them can handle it if mildly overclocked. I used to watch 1080p without video chip HD acceleration with an E2180 @ 3GHz and it wasn't anywhere near 100% load though I forget what % it was.

 

[elconejito]

^^^ What mindless said.

IGP or video card acceleration (whether it's h264 or mpg accel) just lets you play the content on a slower system with a lesser CPU. If you've got enough horsepower in the CPU, the IGP acceleration isn't really needed. It is nice, but isn't needed.

Just as an example, I had an e6300 in my HTPC (since upgraded) that would hit about 70-80% CPU with HD content, resulting in a rare skip here and there. Putting in video card acceleration cut CPU usage down to about 10% and no skipping.

If your friend is only watching content and not doing anything else at the time, without video acceleration probably anything above maybe 2Ghz should be just fine. Probably over 2.5Ghz if you want to do other things at the same time. With video acceleration, you can go really low-end on the CPU, so maybe the $$$ you save on the CPU can get you a little nicer motherboard with IGP video acceleration.