Hi,

I am trying to find a good low power motherboard for an HTPC. Ideally I would like an Atom with hardware decoder which has hdmi output. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to exist, unless you know otherwise

At the moment I am looking at the J&W Minix which has good onboard graphics for the decoding and HDMI. The trouble is that needs a slightly too power hungry AMD cpu which uses 45 watts TDP, although I could probably undervolt and get 30 watts, plus it would give me extra power in case the video can't be decoded by the hardware.

The next board I looked at was an Intel which had HDMI and and accepted a core2. Undervolting was not possible and the core2 cpus have 65 watts TDP.

Oh, and I want to run fanless and ready to go to extreme lengths with custom heat pipe and massive heatsink solution if necessary (which wouldn't be necessary with the atom). What would you guys suggest?

Seems to have been posted twice, sorry.

I sold my Minix fairly recently (good mobo, but I stopped using the HTPC). With a 45W TDP CPU, it should run very efficiently. Keep in mind that the TDP is just a vague approximation for the processor series' max possible power usage. For example, some those Core 2 CPU's you mentioned that have a TDP of 65W will actually run at around 30W max.

Anyway, you didn't seem to mention this, but I assume that you want a mini-ITX system? If you're OK with mATX, you open up a lot of possibilites. The options you have with mini-ITX are quite limited if you want a good IGP. The Minix would probably be your best bet, in that case, at least at a fairly reasonable price. Otherwise, you can go with a 780G or better AMD system, or maybe a low-power (e.g., E5200) C2D system with onboard GeForce 9300 or 9400.

Hope that helps a little!

EDIT: I just did a quick search... If you want mini-ITX, maybe something like THIS may not be bad. Just stick in an E5200 or something like that.

Thanks, I will check out that board.