upscaling / filters etc. i find my bluray rips seem fine... but it's the standard def videos that aren't as good...

have a play with some of the ffdshow filters you might get a more pleasing picture...

Come close in what respect? In my experience, with 2.8/3.0 Ghz Athlon X2 in AMD 780G, 785G, and 890G boards & LCD TVs, the overall performance has been excellent. Not always the same, but close enough, especially after a minor tweak for color settings. My first plasma TV sample gave me trouble with judder initially, but that got sorted out after much playing around, basically matching VGA refresh rates with the FPS of the video source. A recent upgrade to an 890G board + 3.2 GHz Phenom II x2 555 -- with all 4 core unlocked -- eliminated virtually all trace of judder or motion-related artifacts from 99% of video playback. The Ph2 555 offers great performance for a $90 CPU. Even w/ all 4 cores unlocked, the idle power barely went up from the 45W TDP X2 Athlon I was using before (40W or less at idle, 50s in playback).

speaking of which Mike, did you do a judder test with sandy bridge, i'm getting mixed reports of 24p support (missingremote.com seems to say there are extra options without UAC enabled?)

Not yet. What sources other than missingremote do you refer to?

missingremote is the only one that talks about 24fps support with UAC disabled, you'd probably have to ping them for more details.

Anandtech claims in their article that their is no 24p support due to a limitation in the chipset (from what i read)..

I guess only Intel know the real answer! judging by missing remote it looks liek something that could come to a future driver? but what they actually had was not 23.976, but something close 23.974 (I think?) which will also judder...though a lot less?

Mike btw, any comments on uefi boot times??

This is headed off-topic...but...
It could be a couple of things.
- DRM/Hollywood getting in the way. For example, Netflix streams higher data rate to an appliance (PS3, TV, BD player) than via Silverlight on your PC.
- Your TV settings for the PC input. Some TVs, like Samsung LCD, reduce their horrible input lag by removing most of the video processing that makes the picture look good.
- Your gpu doesn't support/has awful support for the file type/resolution you want to stream.

I have something to add to this OT so I created a new thread here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=61204

Let's assume I'll get 30" screen with that resolution. Is the HD 3000 really enough for it for non gaming use? I would assume that playing any kind of HD content full screen would require more power than what HD 3000 offers. I'm thinking about either of the following setups:
1x30" + 1x24"
2x24"

If the HD 3000 can handle those it would be perfect for me. I might even go with 2600 and HD 2000 (instead of 2600K) if it is enough for those setups. Main reason is that non K version of the processor supports all the virtualization things and I'm not going to overclock it.

In case you did not notice, there is no difference in non-3D performance between the HD2000 and HD3000. Intel states that explicitly, and we confirmed it. The differences show up only in 3D apps like games.

Your HD content have a fixed resolution. Decoding is the hard part, scaling the image to your resolution is not a very complicated process and 3D performance has little to do with it. So you'll be fine.

One very common 3D app is Windows Aero interface.
While not being particularly demanding it's still "bad" enough to bring most integrated graphics to its knees at higher resolution.

I guess the question is what "Windows Experience" score is reached by these IGPs.

Cheers
Olle

i2500 (HD 2000) on a Gigabyte H67A-UD3H board:

WEI graphics 5.1
WEI gaming graphics 5.8

A driver update for the Intel HD Graphics was released through Windows Update today and it changed my WEI scores quite a bit.
I'm using W7 HP x64 with an Intel i5-2500 (HD 2000) on an Asus P8H67M-LE clocked with a max freq. of 1600MHz and 128MB shared memory.

Before update (ver. 8.15.10.2219):
Graphics: 5.7
Gaming graphics: 5.0

After update (ver. 8.15.10.2342):
Graphics: 5.7
Gaming graphics: 6.1

That's a pretty nice little boost in performance, albeit reflected through a synthetic test.

Raises the question whether the update just change the evaluation or if it actually changes the performance.
Have you run any other benchmarks to see if there's a difference?

Another thing:
Page 1 needs an update clarifying that HD3000 is also used in all "mobile" versions of SB.

Cheers
Olle

Well the WEI score didn't just change after I updated the driver, after rebooting the WEI said it "detected new hardware" and needed to be refreshed. So it went through the tests and the new score came back. I haven't done any other benchmarks yet.