SPCR

ClubIt has the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H in stock for $96 + shipping:

http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=CA4830739

Thank you. I've been waiting for this to become available, but was expecting to have to wait another couple weeks.

If you buy one, a brief review of the board would be gratefully received.

I second the request for a brief review.

Any guesses on whether this mobo + low end phenom (9100?) would be enough to handle blu-ray?

I am going to get a ATX board. I think it will more likely accommodate the Ninja or Andy. I don't even care for those little HTPC cases so I have no need for a micro.

Ouf, costy.

I ordered the board so hopefully it will be here by the end of the week. If you guys have specific questions, let me know and I'll answer them as best I can.

I'm very much interested in the following aspects:

1. Does the board support voltage control in the BIOS?
2. Does audio work over the HDMI output?
3. What's the lowest possible CPU clock for smooth 1080i HDTV playback? and for smooth Blu-ray/HD-DVD playback?
4. What are the power consumption figures at idle and under load?
5. Finally, does the NB heatsink feel hot?

The results for 3 would give me an idea of how the new IGP compares to the discrete HD2400 in terms HDTV playback performance. In a brief test I conducted some months ago, I found the HD2400 capable of smooth playback of 1080i HDTV recordings with an underclocked (@1ghz) Brisbane 4000 at about 60% CPU usage.

Thanks!

ouch...that is expensive, $20-30 more than 690G...given you can get a 3450 addon for <$50...tough decision.

frank2003 wrote: What's the lowest possible CPU clock for smooth 1080i HDTV playback? and for smooth Blu-ray/HD-DVD playback?

Make that "...and for smooth Blu-ray playback?"

The war is over: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Gadget ... id=4309219

Sorry it's taken so long for me to respond. The board was delivered on Friday, but I was out of town until Sunday evening. And I've been getting killed at work this week, so I haven't had much time to play with my new toy. Anyway, I finally got Vista installed and updated, so on to your questions.

frank2003 wrote: 1. Does the board support voltage control in the BIOS?

Not sure what type of voltage control you're referring to, so I'll tell you what I can.
The CPU voltage is adjustable from 0.8V-1.9V. (.025V increments from .8 to 1.55 and .05V increments above that)
The RAM voltage only has 4 settings: Normal, +0.1V, +0.2V, +0.3V.
The CPU and system fan voltages are both controlled by the board, but aren't adjustable.

frank2003 wrote: 2. Does audio work over the HDMI output?

Absolutely. I plugged it in and it worked. Nothing to enable, no settings to change, it just worked. In fact the audio was working before I even got the video enabled.

frank2003 wrote: 3. What's the lowest possible CPU clock for smooth 1080i HDTV playback? and for smooth Blu-ray/HD-DVD playback?

I'm not sure how to test this as I don't have a Blu-ray drive or movie. I could download a 1080i movie trailer and try that for you, but I know the encoding is different on those. I'm open to suggestions.

frank2003 wrote: 4. What are the power consumption figures at idle and under load?

I can't really test this as I don't have a power meter and I don't really care enough to buy one. If there's some other way, I'm all ears.

frank2003 wrote: 5. Finally, does the NB heatsink feel hot?

I wish I had a temperature probe to give you some numbers as "hot" is very subjective. Compared to my old Geforce 6150, just about anything is cool. I would say the Northbridge heatsink gets warm, but not hot. I can touch it for an extended period and it feels warm, but not to the point of being uncomfortable.


I'll just throw out a few other observations.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the box, was how small all of the capacitors are. I think the tallest one on the board is only 1/2" tall. You'll have absolutely no heatsink clearance issues with this board.
The only minor annoyance I've found so far, is that I can't adjust the BIOS with my USB keyboard. I can hit DEL to get into the BIOS, but once there, I can't do anything. I have an old PS2 keyboard plugged in currently, but I'll remove it once I'm sure I have all the settings where I want them.

Hope that helps. I'll be happy to answer any further questions if I can.

oso wrote: The CPU voltage is adjustable from 0.8V-1.9V. (.025V increments from .8 to 1.55 and .05V increments above that)

...

I wish I had a temperature probe to give you some numbers as "hot" is very subjective. Compared to my old Geforce 6150, just about anything is cool. I would say the Northbridge heatsink gets warm, but not hot. I can touch it for an extended period and it feels warm, but not to the point of being uncomfortable.

The CPU voltage is the important one so that is excellent news.

Also very good news about the relatively cool Northbridge heatsink.

Looks like we may have a winner here! Thanks for the report.

Now I just need to find one available here in the UK...

Mariner wrote:Now I just need to find one available here in the UK...

Here ya go:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductI ... tID=775308

I'm wondering whether it'll work in a Silverstone LC-11 with the layout of the PCI(-E) slots.

Having heard that the northbridge runs really hot under load (for example when decoding a HD video stream), I'm going to wait for the GeForce 8200 based boards. Gigabyte has one coming (GA-M78UM-S2H) that seems to match the features of the GA-MA78GM-S2H, but with the MCP78 chipset.

Sure, the MCP78 might be just as hot, but I'm still waiting to see how it will turn out. An early test indicated that the MCP78 needs a few watts less. Also, the graphics performance seems better on the MCP78, atleast compared to the version of RS780 that lacks dedicated memory.

frank2003 wrote:ClubIt has the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H in stock for $96 + shipping:

I don't see a frame buffer memory chip on this board, so I assume this is the slower 780G.

QuietOC wrote:

frank2003 wrote:ClubIt has the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H in stock for $96 + shipping:

I don't see a frame buffer memory chip on this board, so I assume this is the slower 780G.

Yep, it is.

A good point about the heat of the northbridge. I'm actually pretty busy over the next month so I reckon I can wait and see which of the chipsets is cooler. 3D Performance of the IGP is pretty much irrelevant for me as I'm not intending to do any gaming on my HTPC in any case.

It may actually be that the same NB on some brands of motherboards will be cooler than on others - I believe this is something we've seen before?

Thanks oso for the report. Good to hear that HDMI audio works as it's a big deal for me.

On the gigabyte 690G board the NB is so hot that you would not want to want to touch it with your fingers for more than a few seconds. And that's when the system is idle. Since you didn't feel the NB was hot I guess it's an improvement over the 690G.

Mikael/Mariner, I think it's OK for the NB to get hot when doing heavy video decoding as the work is now off loaded from the CPU to the IGP, so long as it doesn't cause the system to freeze or show video artifacts due to overheating.

frank2003 wrote:Mikael/Mariner, I think it's OK for the NB to get hot when doing heavy video decoding as the work is now off loaded from the CPU to the IGP, so long as it doesn't cause the system to freeze or show video artifacts due to overheating.

That's the thing. I saw a guy with two of these boards that actually had them artifact and then freeze (during HD playback). Then again, he may have gotten early boards, because other users have reported that their boards work fine. It still made me a little cautious towards it.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the initial drivers for the motherboard are a bit flaky, not to mention the BIOS. I know that in the past I've had boards which were practically unusable until later BIOS revisions fixed bugs.

My initial excitement has abated and I'll wait until the end of March/early April before making a purchase.

Mariner wrote:It also wouldn't surprise me if the initial drivers for the motherboard are a bit flaky, not to mention the BIOS. I know that in the past I've had boards which were practically unusable until later BIOS revisions fixed bugs.

*cough*ASRock*cough*

My initial excitement has abated and I'll wait until the end of March/early April before making a purchase.

Awww... I was hoping you were going to try it out so I could continue stalking you on you PC specs Anyway I've convinced myself that this board wouldn't fit in an LC-11 so I'm going to have to wait for other manufacturers to come up with their offerings. So I might as well wait for MCP78 too!

GeForce 8200 preview:

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... =6&id=2494

Looks like this baby also gets very hot.

So far it does look like the 780G chipset boards are the best HTPC boards around. I wonder if 790GX microatx boards will be any better (as they are also supposed to support full H.264/VC1 decode, but come with a faster GPU (HD3300)...at least according to Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_700_ch ... 80G.2F780V

I dl'd the manual for the GA-MA78GM-S2H with the 780G chipset and it still recommends an Athlon X2 4200+ (or better). Isn't that still kinda high if full acceleration is provided onboard?

Edirol wrote:Looks like this baby also gets very hot.

Temperature != power.

Single-chip solution under a *very* small heatsink... not directly comparable to a two-chip solution with one of them under a rather large heatsink by simply using the "finger test".

Shame they didn't do any decent power measurements, guess we'll have to wait for a competent review.

Oh and that they used a stupid-mendous fast CPU and that when NVIDIA said it "is quite sure that acceptable performance can be achieved with something as low as an Athlon 64 X2 3500+" their brains didn't figure to try such a chip to see whether it worked? Or to underclock the one they've got even ... rather than wasting their own time and ours trying to *overclock* on a uATX IGP board.

EDIT: Hey you see now this:

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1295/ ... index.html

is how you don't do power consumption measurements for an HTPC-oriented motherboard either.

I would want to know how hybrid sli compares to hybrid crossfire.
I know when you plug in a high end nvidia card, it isn't slied anymore and the IGP only hauls the data of the discrete card and at idle it shuts it down completely and runs the IGP only. Does hybrid crossfire do the same for high end cards?

Biostar officially announced their 780G board. Links here:

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/9057/index.html
http://images.tweaktown.com/imagebank/n ... TA780G.doc

According to the specs in the Press Release, HDMI appears to be a manufacturing option. We've already seen that the China version does not have HDMI. I'm hoping the US version will have HDMI and the presumed HDCP support for BD playback. Otherwise we will have to ask, "Why bother?"

I've seen this at a canadian etailer and it didn't have hdmi, i don't know about hdcp, since dvi and hdmi are pin compatible, maybe hdcp is carried through hdmi anyways, so a simple dvi to hdmi cable could do the job. It's also about 10$ cheaper than the gigabyte board.

Spare Tire wrote:I would want to know how hybrid sli compares to hybrid crossfire.

Based on this review, Hybrid SLI doesn't yet work properly. I'd expect the issue is that the drivers need to mature. Meanwhile, I've seen reviews of AMD boards that show Hybrid Crossfire working (ie 780 IGP + HD3450 better than HD3450 alone), so Nvidia is a bit behind here (but then again so is the availability of their boards). Given that Crossfire is actually an open standard, I'm curious to see if future Intel IGP support Hybrid Crossfire. I'm sure they'll have their own version of the feature once they release their forthcoming discrete solution, but that's still a ways away. If they don't support Hybrid Crossfire in the interim, it would seem like Nvidia would be the only way to go for Intel µATX, unless you had no use whatsoever for 3D.

Yes, HDCP can be passed through DVI. If you look at the majority of current generation graphics cards, you will note that almost every single one touts HDCP support despite having only DVI output. Apparently even audio can be passed through DVI, as there are a few cards with this feature as well.

Good point about the HDCP over DVI. I knew about the HDCP and audio over DVI on my Biostar and Gigabyte 690G boards but I had always thought the features were side effects of the HDMI out.

I just read the Biostar manual and saw mention of HDCP in the specs, so that's good news. Since there's no HDMI connector naturally there's no mention in the BIOS of HDMI audio. But there are settings for Azalia audio but I'm not sure if that's the same as routing audio to DVI out. So audio over DVI is an unknown on this board.

I also notice the BIOS has only overvoltage control but not undervoltage control. But that's nothing new for Biostar as the initial version(s) of the 690G also did not have undervoltage control in the BIOS until a later version that came out two months after the release of the board.

From my experience with Gigabyte and Biostar I'm partial to the Biostar board in terms of power consumption and NB heat generation. I think I'll wait and see how things pan out once the 780G products are officially released.

So is there any hard data what CPU I minimally need to decode 1080P Bluray content on a AMD780 board?