Walter Sobchak
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capable of giving me HD audio to the analouge inputs of my Denon 3802.
Can it be done for under £600?
Can it be done for under £600?
IMO, you'd need a "designed for HiDef video" graphics card or a more powerful CPU (or both ) - the Geforce 7100 / E2160 would most likely not be powerful enough.
While I've not tried it specifically with this Gigabyte board myself, if you use PowerDVD Ultra as your BD/HDDVD player, it may even refuse to start BD/HDDVD playback, complaining about the graphics card!
For graphics cards, you are probably looking at the ATI 2400XT/2600Pro/2600XT as being the most suitable, while from Nvidia it'd be the 8500GT/8600GT.
If you want analogue outputs to your receiver, that means the audio decoding will also have to be done in the HTPC (unless it's LPCM already), so that's a further CPU overhead to consider!
The soundcard is another possible upgrade you may wish to consider!
The DACs on the motherboard are unlikely to be superhifi quality (consider the total cost of the motherboard and the likely amount that's therefore been spent on the DAC section) - though I suppose you could try the suck it and see approach here!
As for CPU, it really depends on what you are using for the graphics (and whether the graphics card will be doing any of the decoding, and if so, how much - ie video acceleration).
With no video acceleration, I think an E2160 would struggle at stock speed.
You could overclock it of course (like the E2180, these chips overclock pretty well), but if you want a stock speed solution, I think you need to look higher up the range - something like the E6750. (Any higher than that though, and personally I'd be looking at the quad cored Q6600 in preference to the dual core E6850 - both are around the same price - £170).
With a graphics card which can take some of the decoding load off the main CPU, the processing requirement drops significantly - in that case an E2160 should cope quite easily.
You should note though that getting video acceleration working properly, while a doddle for many, has posed significant problems for some - it seems a bit flaky at times (though many of the issues have been around XP, so hopefully won't be relevant to Vista users)
Further if you have any Hi Def h.264 (mkv files) the graphics card doesn't help at all and your processor choice may struggle with the 1080p ones.
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Granted but I'm referring to all MKV's and specifically those mkv's that are most widely available. I have over 1tb of hi def mkv's and none of them get hardware accelerated.That is not true I'm afraid.
MKVs are accelerated completely if they are encoded correctly using profile L4.1 and a suitable codec.