GeForce 8200 - 8 Channel LPCM Output Fully Supported!! - Page 14

Originally Posted by Bahn Yuki

Guys I was wondering if the 8200 will even be supported by XP at all. I had Vista 64 for over a year and never had a problem with it, but when switching back to XP I noticed huge performance increases.

I don't mind Vista, it's just slower than XP, since this is strictly an HTPC, I don't think OS matters much. I'm just curious as to if I should start readying for Vista 64 if I have to.

AMD Phenom 9150e + Geforce 8200 is what I'm gunning for, how about you guys? Anyone here getting an 8300? or perhaps an Intel solution?

Originally Posted by jimwhite

I'm tempted but have NEVER owned an AMD cpu... I really don't want to go through the hassle of learning all about the un-ending varieties of AMD cpu's....

Originally Posted by jimwhite

I'm tempted but have NEVER owned an AMD cpu... I really don't want to go through the hassle of learning all about the un-ending varieties of AMD cpu's....

Originally Posted by AbMagFab

Anyway, it might be a non-issue since it looks like none of these boards are going to be out before AMD goes out of business, anyway.

Originally Posted by cybrsage

AMD has been going out of business since the 1990s...

Originally Posted by AbMagFab

I'm in the same boat as you. Good news is that it's not that complicated, if you stick to the quad-cores (Photon's or Phenom's or whatever they're called).

And there's a new set coming out that all end in '50' (e.g. 9150) which is what you want to get, as it's fixed some bug, that I didn't care to understand.

Originally Posted by sotti

It's not that tricky, there are dual cores and quad cores. Low voltage chips and normal chips, pretty similiar to intel.

Pick your number of cores, Pick a clock speed, pick a wattage output.

I'd say for these boards, 2 cores, 2.2-24ghz and wattage based on your personal perefrence for low voltage chips.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103776

moderetly low wattage 2.3ghz chip. If you're on the cheap this is pretty much spot on.

Originally Posted by AbMagFab

Whether you have boards or not, they aren't supposed to be for sale yet, most likely because they are working on the drivers.

Originally Posted by Jpebcac

Well, we were told by a distributor these are embargoe'd, not to be sold at all until 4/14, when we expect to see final BIOS. I didn't realize this. In fact, they basically told me our sales rep screwed up and everyone was supposed to get ONE board to test, not the whole lot.. which is understandable, we had not ordered these, I had ordered up the M3A, and received these instead.

The crashing problems are fairly significant, but it appears as though it's a driver issue and may be resolved.

Heat is a problem that can be resolved, but I'm not sure how easy that will be, I'd probably want to replace the northbridge unit as a bare minimum.

We'll see. I turned in 8 boards and kept two. I'll let others be guinea pigs

Originally Posted by nathan_h

Bug? Say it ain't so! Looks like you are referring to this thing fixed in Vista32 SP1?

There were only three quad AMD CPUs to choose from, and I got the AMD Phenom 9500 Agena 2.2GHz Socket AM2+ 95W Quad-Core Processor.

It's overkill for a low end HTPC, but I want to be able to do full software decoding as we as hardware decoding, post-processing, etc, depending on source material, software available, and my mood.

Originally Posted by sotti

No the current Phenom chips have a hardware TLB error, it's very very rarely occouring for desktop chips, but it can pop up with more frequency in server enviroments.

There is bios fix for it, but it can eat up to 10% of your perfomance depending on your benchmark. You can turn the bios fix off on some motherboards and get full perfomance. The new B3 stepping that has the bug fixed performs equal to the previous version with the bios fix off.

article on the problem and fix:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=3260

Originally Posted by audiophile_au

we still don't have the 8200 version in australia!.....

Originally Posted by MikeSM

I just got info back from my local distributer that the Asus M3N-H/HDMI, which is an 8300 based motherboard, should ship around 4/15 according to Asus. So it should be available at various vendors around that time.

Originally Posted by Speqtre

If it matters to anyone who's excited by this, it looks like this particular mobo is full ATX, not mATX...

Originally Posted by AbMagFab

I though the nVidia site showed both the 8200 and 8300 as mATX?

Originally Posted by Jpebcac

Well, we were told by a distributor these are embargoe'd, not to be sold at all until 4/14, when we expect to see final BIOS. I didn't realize this. In fact, they basically told me our sales rep screwed up and everyone was supposed to get ONE board to test, not the whole lot.. which is understandable, we had not ordered these, I had ordered up the M3A, and received these instead.

The crashing problems are fairly significant, but it appears as though it's a driver issue and may be resolved.

Heat is a problem that can be resolved, but I'm not sure how easy that will be, I'd probably want to replace the northbridge unit as a bare minimum.

We'll see. I turned in 8 boards and kept two. I'll let others be guinea pigs

Originally Posted by caskater

I'm faced with this problem today I'm hoping all of you can give your opinion on.

Here's my situation:

I currently have the following components available for my HTPC:
1. ASUS P5E-VM HDMI (I have one day left to be able to return this mobo to Fry's)
2. Abit IP35 Pro
3. Intel Core2 E2140
4. MSI GeForce 8600GT HDMI (w/internal SPDIF connector)

At present I am using the P5E-VM HDMI mobo and no add-on video card. Unfortunately I have not been able to achieve a high enough overclock to make Blu-Ray playback smooth (I can only get 2.4Ghz). This obviously presents an issue. As I see it I have the following options:
1. Keep the P5E-VM HDMI and buy a faster processor
2. Return the P5E-VM HDMI, sell the E2140 and buy an nVidia 8200 based board with a cheap AMD processor. I've been postponing this decision in hopes the 8200's would be released but as they still aren't available I will have to hold myself over with my Abit IP35Pro using an 8600GT HDMI+SPDIF card until they are.
3. Keep the P5E-VM HDMI, buy a faster processor and if/when the 8200 or G45 come out and prove to work much better. Sell off parts and buy one of those as necessary.

The main reason why i'm considering this is because the 8200 will offer full hardware acceleration, hopefully no HDCP repeater bug and from everything i've read Intel has the worst PQ of all. PQ and SQ are two items that are absolutely paramount to me. As such i'm trying to get the closest to a standalone player experience as I can without having to wait another year to get it. Passing audio over analog is not an option for me. I want everything to be passed through HDMI to my receiver (ideally bitstreamed audio but seeing as how thats far off i'll settle with LPCM).

So what would you do? Thanks!

Originally Posted by elee532

Any advantage to mATX board if I already have case that supports full ATX?