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Looking for a HTPC motherboard

B

bearxor

Diamond Member
Hey guys, I'm looking to redo my HTPC from a bulky Opteron 165 in to a much smaller C2D setup.

I had kept the old system around because I needed so many tuners. I had a PVR-500, 2 VBOX DTA-150's, all three cards PCI, along with 2 HVR-1250's and a silent cooler GF8500GT, all three PCI Express.

Now, with new nVidia chipset motherboards coming out with integrated GF93/9400's with HDCP-compliant HDMI outputs, I'm wanting to move to a smaller board. At the same time, fortunately, my cable provider is moving all channels to unencrypted QAM. I've replaced my 5 Tuner cards with 2 HVR-2250's, which will be just dual-tuner QAM, so 4 sources instead of 6.

These are PCI-Express. So, I'm looking for a C2D motherboard with the newer nVidia chipset and all pci-express. This is so I can have future expansion. But, all the motherboards I can find are 1 x16, 1 x1 and 2 PCI slots. I'm looking for an all PCI Express board. I can use the x1 and x16 slots for my HVR-2250's, but if I wanted to add an extra HVR-2250 in the future I would be out of luck.

Has anyone seen anything fitting what I'm looking for? mATX, in case I didn't make it clear. Looking to go small.
 
GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H

Expansion Slots:
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 (x8, x8)
PCI Express x1 3
PCI Slots 2

It's an ATI onboard GPU that's rated for 1080p/i through HDMI and DVI-I and DirectX10.

Also, it can be a low footprint with just coolers for the CPU and your add-on cards, if they need them.


Just this weekend, I configured an HD/Blu Ray drive with the set up and watched The Fall and Wall-E blu ray disks. The board also comes with Dolby Digital Live included.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't looked at ATI-based solutions, having always read that for video quality, nVidia was usually better. The X1300 I had in my HTPC before the 8500GT didn't really help my perception either. I think I would be willing to look at an ATi solution, and maybe I'll go peruse them.

The downsides to the board you have linked are it is full ATX, I'm looking for mATX, and it's an Athlon board, which is just a big no-no for me at this point.

Well, never mind... I guess since the AMD acquisition, ATi had to stop making chipsets for Intel processors. At this point, I am absolutely anti-AMD processors, so I'm not willing to look in that direction at all.
 
I'd say you are out of luck.

mATX boards will most likely have 4 expansion slots and at least one of them will be PCI. I don't think you will top that Gigabyte 790gx with 5 PCIe slots ...

And I'd like to know the name of the provider who is going all "unencrypted QAM" - that would mean that all of their premium content would be free
 
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