The Official Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H RS780 mATX Thread - Page 23

Are you sure? I thought there were 3 mandatory codecs with Blu-ray (DTS, DD and LPCM), and that only one was required on each disc to be compliant.

EDIT: Yes, I believe that is accurate. Take a look here: http://www.blu-raystats.com/stats.php?OrderBy=Audio. There are many releases that only have LPCM. EDIT: False again, the chart doesn't list all tracks available.

That's fine, to each his own. However one thing to note. Is that not all Blu-ray discs have a user selectable AC3 track. They do have one, but they are considered a fall back for a player that doesn't advertise TrueHD support. PC players support TrueHD (and thus advertise it), so you'll have a hard time getting that hidden AC3 file to work. In that case the behavior is to decode the TrueHD file into PCM and S/PDIF can only transport 2-channel PCM, so you'll get stereo audio over S/PDIF. Cyberlink also includes their own PCM to DTS or DD software encoder as an advanced option for certain titles, but it is really terrible, the proper DTS Connect or Dolby Digital Live solutions are much better.

Oops yes I was thiking of Blu-ray discs with a TrueHD track. In that case there is a companion AC3 file that is essentially hidden next to it, and is used when a device doesn't advertise TrueHD compatibility.

However you'll notice in practice you don't find many Blu-ray discs with LPCM only, they usually have an AC3 track, so S/PDIF users don't get stuck with 2-channel audio only.

I agree with you except for studio-compressed AC3 tracks. I still think real-time DTS with over double the bandwidth will sound better.

Yes, right. I was under the impression that a DTS-encode would have the same bitrate as that encoded by the studio to produce the DTS track. However, if the DTS-connect encode would have a higher bitrate, then surely, you would have to give the nod to the former.

Yes that is coherent with the fact that TrueHD is not mandatory on Blu-ray, so discs can't have that as their sole audio track.


See link above. If the info is accurate, there are quite a few.

That chart lists the default audio track, as I said go look at the actual box specs, there is almost always a secondary option for an AC3 track. Disney does this with every release I can find details on. Fox is covered because they use DTS-HD MA which has the DTS core to fall back on. Warner uses TrueHD and thus has a companion AC3 file. Likewise Sony tends to use TrueHD these days, and when they didn't they included a standard AC3 file in addition to LCPM.

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/reviews.html Check out the reviews for the audio codecs listed. There is almost always a English Dolby Digital 5.1 option.

To be clear I'm not defending my post where I admittedly goofed about AC3 being mandatory. What I'm saying is that while it's not mandatory to always include an AC3 track, you'll notice it's a defacto practice to do so anyway.

EDIT: Anywho... this is getting the 780G thread way off topic.

Indeed it looks like you're right. Strange because for some discs the chart does list multiple codecs. Anyhow, that negates part of the need for DTS Connect, though as you pointed out it is still useful to get better quality audio in some cases.

On an on-topic note, I ended up ordering this board tonight. My "legacy" HTPC is dying (leaking capacitors) and the wife would kill me if she were without her DVR for more than a few days, so I couldn't wait anymore... Will report back when it's up and running.

Bummer about the defective caps, but cool that you now get an excuse to try out new tech

Yeah and I'll have the "no HDMI audio" excuse to upgrade again in a few months!


I for one need to go edit several posts where I was inadvertently spreading false information about "many" discs only having LPCM. Wonder how many there actually are, if at all?

Did you order a new CPU?

I still haven't found the 4850e in stock. Anbody find it yet?

However, I did get a Newegg promo E-mail that has X2 5000 Black Edition for the same price (promo code EMCADBBAD) as the real-soon-now 4850e. I think I have a spare AM2 heat sink.

Besides the extra 20W dissipate inside the case, any downside to just buying the 5000 BE?

Vkristof:

I have my new 780g board sitting here also waiting for a cpu I wan't either the 4850e or the new low power phenom. I looked high and low on the net last night and no one has them is stock yet hopefully we do not have too much longer to wait. Did you ever buy that low dollar case with from newegg? If so I would love to hear your impression of it.

On antoher note no one has talked about the heat problem with the gigabyte board recently. Has this issue been fixed with the new bios or does it still require a fan on the heatsink?

There are several HD-DVD/Blu-ray Disc movies, sources with multi-channel PCM, downloaded videos with multi-channel mpeg-1 audio, WMV-HD movies, or multi-channel WMA music, etc. that result in only 2-channel S/PDIF. The following is the statistics concerning BD movies based on the following database:

Unofficial Blu-ray Audio and Video Specifications Thread.

- If the main audio track is LPCM, then the probability is very low (< 3%). The majority include DD 5.1 as the secondary soundtrack.

- If the main audio track is DTS-HD Master Audio, the probability is 0% as DTS-HD MA includes DTS as the core stream.

- If the main audio track is Dolby TrueHD, the probability is high (> 50%). The number of movies with Dolby TrueHD is very small (only ~30 titles right now), but will surely increase in future. Spider-Man 3 is a typical example which includes LPCM 5.1 as the secondary audio so that you can't get surround sounds from S/PDIF without DTS Connect or DDL.

• Spider-Man 3
  • Main Audio Track: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
  • Secondary Audio Track: LPCM 5.1 4.6Mb/s 16-bit

- One third of the BD movies still have DD 5.1 or DTS as the main soundtrack.

Conclusion

DTS Connect (or DDL) is a must if you want to get 5.1 S/PDIF from every source.

I haven't read this thread and don't have this board, but regarding chipsets and heat I can say my Gigabyte 690G board chipsets ran hot, while the same chipsets on my Biostar TA690G were cool to touch.

I removed both chipset heatsinks on the Gigabyte and they had some of the worst looking "thermal material" I've ever seen. It was like hard, dried clay, and basically little left on the chip itself. I carefully chiseled it off the chipsets with my fingernail and used a razor blade to scrap off the heatsinks, alcohol cleaned them, applied some Arctic Silver 5 to the chipsets. Now the heatsinks are warm to touch instead of hot.

I initially contacted Gigabyte and told them my Biostar chipsets were cool but their board was hot. They didn't care, just said we tested it and it and it passed, good enough.

Also the Realtek LAN on the Biostar 8111b (running on the PCI-e bus) works decently in both directions, on the Gigabyte 8110SC (runnning on the PCI bus) it will receive ok but sends very s-l-o-w so I disabled the LAN and am using a Intel Pro1000 instead. Even with the card the Gigabyte will upload at a max of 75MBytes/sec, but the Biostar onboard will do 109Mbytes/sec.

Honestly, I am not very happy with the Gigabyte 690G board, but really like the Biostar board because it "just works" regardless of the settings. Neither board have been used in HTPC, doh.

BTW GA-MA78GM-S2H has the LAN chip RTL8111C which is on the PCI Express bus. The reason why GA-MA69GM-S2H's LAN chip is on the PCI bus is that its only PCI Express slot (other than the PCI Express x16 slot) works at x4 so that it uses up all the PCI Express lanes of the northbridge (a bad design IMO).

Yes, but that's the ONE feature I bought the 690GM at my day job for. It's the first AMD system we built at work.

The one application we bought it for doesn't work because the card does NOT recognize a PLX 8114 (PCIe to PCI bridge) that we use on our own add-in cards. Haven't troubleshot either, but I suspect if we bought an Intel-branded MB it would work OK. Actually, the add-in card w/ PLX 8114 DOES work fine in the Intel-based motherboards we have in the lab.

Got my GA-MA78GM-S2H board from Newegg yesterday.
Put in my Phenom 9500 in, with a very quiet $29 Scythe SCKC-1000 100mm Sleeve "KAMA CROSS" 3Heat Pipes CPU Cooler (http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16835185045). Runs at 93 deg F. at idle- not too bad.
Northbridge gets pretty hot- even with the newest F3e bios update. Ran the computer for a few min with the side cover off to make sure everything was Ok, then put the side cover back on. After running for about 30 min I took the side cover off again and noticed the Northbridge heatsink was cooler this time due to the crossflow in my case with the side cover on- 120mm exhaust fan in the rear and an 80mm inlet fan in the front. Could probably benefit from active cooling, but with decent case crossflow it doesn't seem to be a big issue.

I found that FreeNas doesn't support the onboard LAN chip RTL8111C, so I ordered the Intel PRO/1000 GT which FreeNas does support.

Using the MB report utility- my MB was dated Feb 11th 2008, AMD OC utility works fine with this board. I cranked the performance slider all the way up to max and no problems. I also used the Gigabyte supplied utility to OC the CPU to 2380 mhz from the stock 2200 setting and it's been rendering mp4 video for me for 10 hours now, so it seems pretty stable at 8% overclock.

One quick performance note to people who own this board- if you're using two sticks of RAM, put them in slots 1 & 2 and in the BOIS set them to "Ganged" to enable dual channel capability. For whatever reason, the BIOS "optimal settings" option leaves them at "Unganged" and the AMD OC utility reports them as "single channel" in this mode. Once you set them to "Ganged" in the BIOS, the AMD OC utility reports them as "Dual Channel".

As a real world comparison- last time I transcoded a 2 hour movie from mpeg2 to mp4 with Megiu on a AMD Athlon 4200+ Dual Core it took 18 hours total, with this MB and the Phenom 9500 the same 2 hour movie took 11 hours to transcode.

Yes, I ordered the 5000 BE.

I'm hoping this CPU can probabaly be undervolted to similar levels as the 4850e (hope the board supports that!), since almost everyone reports it can run at 3.0 GHz at stock voltage and that it runs very cool.

If you undervolt it to 4850e levels and run it at 2.5 GHz, it will give the same power consumption as the 4850e, since power consumption is a function of voltage and frequency and they are both otherwise identical 65 nm Brisbane cores. Published TDPs are approximate and vary from unit to unit, since some can run at lower voltages than others. In other words, when you buy a 45W TDP CPU, that might be an upper limit, but it is not an exact figure.

Of course, it is likely that a good 4850e could be undervolted even further than a 5000 BE at the same clock speed, but with a little tweaking I believe the actual difference in heat/power consumption will end up being less than 20W. And The 5000 BE gives you a lot more flexibility if you ever need more processing power (eg, to transcode video or what not) or if you want to underclock/undervolt to even lower levels.

Thanks renethx! That really clears it up.

Just a little blurb for anyone looking to buy this board right now. ClubIT has the GA-MA78GM-S2H for $87.55+2.99 shipping currently. Not an amazing deal but it's lower than anywhere else right now.

I realize these posts were from a week or two ago.. but with the SilenX fan in place, does AMD Overdrive still report the NB temperature as being ~80C? If performance has improved, one would suspect a drop in temperature - which means it is being reported incorrectly.

I also recall reading a post where someone measured the temperature with a laser-shoot thermometer and reported lower numbers..

Not that the 4850e is in stock, but pricing on the 45w processors at Buy.com is perplexing:

4850e (2.5 GHz): $96.24

BE-2400 (2.3 GHz): $104.76

BE-2350 (2.1 GHz): $83.99

The suspense is killing me!

Does anyone know when the 780G board roundup will be posted on Anandtech? I'm holding off buying a board until then but I already have all the other hardware on hand (5000+, 2G ram, case...).

For me, this all started about a month ago when I ordered and recieved the Gigabyte 690G mobo, only to find out about the 780G hottness a few days later. Thanks to craigslist, I now have no mobo and just need some guidance between the available 780G options out there before i take the plunge ...again.

When will the review be up???

edit: the 780G preview was a good read but just makes me more anxious for the roundup!

"Temporarily Sold Out" means it is not available yet.

Short update tomorrow afternoon on questions raised from the preview and the full roundup next Wednesday morning. Would be Tuesday but the 790i and 9800GX2 are launching that day.

Bingo13 - Thanks for the info. A longer wait than I was hoping, but at least now I know. :-)

Are you working for AnandTech? Your early HD HQV score is the same as AandTech one. Just from curiosity.

Unless I'm mistaken Bingo13 = Gary Key

Which boards will be covered in the roundup?
Thanks,
CFC

Has anyone booted linux on the 780G? Since the 8200 is not far off from the 780g preview results, which would be better for a myth htpc? Has the gigabyte 8200-based mobo been spotted in US retail stores?