Official Sandy Bridge / LGA1155 for HTPCs Thread

Which date does the NDA lift? How about anandtech including the same great blacklevel analysis as missingremote.com had in their review of the 430? If the card keeps blacker than black, blacklevel at 16 in all players and so on...

MissgingRemotes review just went live. Hope is answers your questions, LMK if it doesn't.

All these reviews show a screen grab of red font with information over the screen. how can i do that?

The Anandtech review.

Sandy Bridge STILL CAN'T DO 23.976 fps properly? FAIL.

What?? Still no proper 24p support! What a shame...

I'm getting a SB laptop, but I want it with AMD graphics. You guys know anyone that's tested SB with AMD switchable graphics?

The 24p issue existed on Intel platforms before Clarkdale so I don't buy this "it was discovered too late to fix" explanation. The more likely explanation is that the number of people who care about/would notice this issue is small and Intel ignored our pleas. Thanks!

Although there is a software fix to change the output to 23.97hz, this is not a solution. The problem will simply be visible less frequently. I guess that this is something but I think that this is a problem that you either care about or don't. So, for those of us who care about it, I doubt that this workaround is satisfactory.

SNB can do 23.973...

I wouldn't be too hasty in judging it like that. On the 3D side, a lot of the problems that people said it could be fixed using drivers turned out to be a hardware issue. The G965/G35/GMA 4500 wasn't slow because the drivers were crap, the hardware was slow because Intel didn't dedicate enough transistors to it.

Intel had to be aware that this was a problem for HTPC users at least as late as the G45 chipset, which was released in the middle of 2008. See this post from an Intel employee in August of 2008, which states that Intel is "taking this pretty seriously."

If it was a hardware issue, I can understand how it might not have been caught in Clarkdale. But come on, this was 2.5 years ago.

Use MPC-HC with its default video renderer (EVR Custom).

G35 didn't have it either, that's why I remember people making a big deal that it wasn't fixed with G45. I'm not even sure if Intel ever supported 23.976.

babgvant, i read youre review. Very nice. But i was confused by the hole 23,973 thing. Is it so, that just because you turn off UAC in windows the setting of 24p suddenly changes from 24,000 to 23,973Hz. Thats just weird...

control + j

It is interesting, but understandable when you think about how kernel mode drivers are separated from user mode applications.

Some communication must be required to sync the clock.

What is the software fix & where to get it.

Disable UAC

I don't know. The Anandtech article refers to one.

Does that completely fix the issue? What impact might that have on other normal HTPC functions?

You get 23.973, so a frame will get dropped every ~4 minutes. Not perfect, but TBH I never noticed it.

Disabling UAC just makes the PC less secure. How big of an issue that is depends on how you use it.

Are those of us sticking with clarkdale going to get these graphics driver updates? I'm assuming drivers are shared? If we get proper 23.9xx output and yCbCr on our existing systems I'll be very happy

Excellent. That "every ~4 minutes" calculation was what I needed, as I wasnt quite sure what being off by 0.003 would do to frames.

As for UAC, I understand the security ramifications, but I wasn't sure if there would be any other htpc-specific "side effects," if you will. Because the impact on framerates seemed a bit random -- even though it makes a little bit of sense regarding clock sync -- I am more concerned about other clock-related functions (audio sync, transcoding, etc) that may also be affected by turning off UAC. Make sense? It was just a thought...

Thanks for the excellent review!!

Oh, and thanks for the review, babgvant!

If it wasn't clear from the review I apologize - do not enable xvYCC (the only way to get YCbCr output) it is broken. I am pushing on them as hard as I can to separate the features. YCbCr and more bit depth would be great options, not sure why they tied it to xvYCC.

No, it was clear that it would destroy the levels. I was just asking if these features would be shared on both the sandy bridge and clarkdale platforms.

If a graphics card is needed for proper 24p with Sandy Bridge then is there a real advantage to building a Low Voltage ITX HTPC with Sandy Bridge over a 45w AMD solution with integrated graphics (785G/880G chipset for example)?

Yes.

After the first few seconds of playback it does not fluctuate much, if at all. I should have made a video

Thanks. One of those ASROCK systems would be really nice