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Considerations for a HTPC.
I get the general impression that the favoured route is the HD 3200 onboard graphics route, however is it better than the Geforce 8200 chip?
The reason why I am swaying towards the 8200 is that the Asus board has a SPDIF out, where as the 780G does not. I require this option to connect the PC to my Sony surround sound.
The Asus M3a78-EM has SPDIF out, 780G chipset and 100% solid caps. In my opinion it is probably the best AM2+ mATX board on the market. It even has firewire.
Not forgetting the IGP is better than the Nvidia 8200 as well.
So its does, 780G with rear spdif, problem solved.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sputnik
Thanks very much.
the 780g graphics is slightly better than the 8200 although it's performance can be effected by things like dedicated memory and such.
the new 9300 is better than the 780g but is currently socket 775 only and it's twice the price. (£120+)
You can overclock that igp crazy amounts i heard, aparently you can get 1ghz out of the core with some crazy cooling.
Just a quick note (as I'm logged in) to say thank you for this thread. I'd forgotten which IGP was best.
I'm comparing this and this.
Whilst I prefer the 780g, the 8200 does have HDMI - although I'm unsure if sound comes out of this. Sound needs to be easy to set up. (Building system for a relative with minimal computer experience.)
As sound could go via 3.5mm -> RCA, or even optical, on the 780g, as well as "future proofing" if DP becomes prominent, I think that the 780g board is better, even if it lacked its graphical power. (Edit: The benefit of HDMI is it would be "single cable", but it's not the end of the world.)
I would get neither TBH!! I would buy the ASUS M3A78-EM for £61 delivered from Ebuyer:Quote:
Originally Posted by baius
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150278
It has HDMI,Displayport,DVI and VGA outputs!! It has firewire and E-SATA too!!
http://www.asus.com/999/images/products/2252/back.jpg
Great call on that mobo if i may say so myself.
The ASUS -EM is definitely the best all round 780G board out there at the minute. The only things it's really lacking is SidePort (IMNSHO, of course ;) ).
The HD3200 can be overclocked - Hexus got their review sample up to 850MHz on passive cooling - although there's only so much a boost in core clock can do for an IGP without dedicated memory! Also be aware that utilising an AM2+ chip like the Athlon 7750BE or Phenom II X3 710 will more than double the memory bandwidth compared with using an AM2 (Athlon 5050e or similar) as it will be able to run HT3.0 instead of 1.0! Comparing Hexus reviews this makes a huge difference to the IGP performance (+~15%, from memory)!
EDIT: gaming results for 780G + Athlon 4850e here (first bar), results for 780G + Phenom X4 9850 here (first column of second group). Shows ~ 20% increase across all games. Given that this is very definitely bottlenecked by the IGP, it's reasonable to assume that the improvement comes down largely to the increased bandwidth available via AM2+
I agree, The Asus M3A78-EM is the best uATX out there and it has all solid caps.
mATX ;)
The 'µ' in µATX stands for nano, 'm' in mATX stands for micro. Both are small, but nano is smaller, more like Atom boards. It's a common misunderstanding though.
Also, ++ on the M3A78-EM, it's a great little board, even though it lacks SidePort memory, it still has plenty of graphical grunt to do nearly everything other than serious gaming.
I always thought µ was micro and wiki tends to agree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroATX
The nano form factor is nano-ITX I thought.
Thanks for that link.
I'm really suprised that Scan doesn't have it...
Scan seems to do more "enthusiast" boards than ebuyer. I'm not quite sure where the -EM lies on the enthusiast / mainstream axis. I guess ASUS would say it's one of their stable business platforms, design to provide the greatest flexibility in connectivity to the busy office user (or something like that - I'm no copywriter).
While Scan lack an obviously brilliant all-round board like this, they do stock the more specialist boards, like the J&W 780G with Sideport, and the Biostar 790GX-XE (mATX 790GX board w. sideport @ £77 - bargain!) which I really like the look of. I guess it would be dull if both companies offered the same selection - that'd just mean less choice for the consumer ;)
Does the M3A78-EM have the ACC BIOS option that unlocks a 4th core on a 3 core CPU?
Not a deal breaker, but would be nice :)
I think that only 790GX motherboards have ACC although I could be wrong here.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
That would be unfortunate, given the price of a 790GX motherboard compared to this would be enough to pay for another core :DQuote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
I got the impression the ACC hardware support was actually in the southbridge, but it all seems rather confused.
Considering that the Phenom II X4 940 is dropping in price to around £160 to £170 then you could be right!!Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
I think I head a rumour that ASRock were releasing a 780G board which uses the SB710 southbridge, which *does* have ACC (it's basically the SB750 without Raid 5), but I've not seen an example on etail yet. The 760G chipset uses SB710 by default, but the graphics core is a somewhat cut down version of the 780Gs (no HD support, for one thing) so it's probably only really worth looking at that if you're going for discreet graphics anyway. Given that Scan have a couple Biostar 790GX boards for < £80 it's not really that much more expensive... ;)