Home Theatre PC Buyer's Guide - Q1 2009
First Choice: J&W Minix 780G
UK Pricing:£96.54 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing:$179.20 (ex. Tax)
Based on the excellent AMD 780G chipset, our current little favourite is still the J&W Minix motherboard. This little wonder was the base for Nick's Mod of the Year winning Chiaroscuro and has tonnes of functionality compressed into its 17x17cm PCB. The feature set includes four SATA, HDMI, DVI, VGA, eSATA, S/PDIF and a PCI-Express x16 (x4 electrical) - everything you'd expect from a high end board, and more.
The AMD 780G chipset includes UVD video acceleration too, and if you do feel the extra need of UVD2 from a Radeon 4000-series graphics card, as one of the only mini-ITX boards with a PCI-Express x16 slot, it has the capacity. It may only accept up to 65W CPUs, but that still covers plenty of dual-cores and even a couple of quad-core processors as well.
CPU
First Choice: AMD Athlon X2 4850eUK Pricing:£49.20 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing:$55.99 (ex. Tax)
The Athlon X2 4850e has become AMD's "Q6600" in our books - month after month we keep recommending it because of its exceptionally low power, just a 45W TDP, and its competitive price. It's extremely inexpensive at under £50 and at 2.5GHz, it's completely capable for most, if not all HD playback (I can vouch from personal experience).
Having said that, clock for clock, Intel’s Core microarchitecture is significantly faster than the old K8 architecture, but that's not to say AMD's processors are inadequate for today's computing tasks - quite the opposite in fact. Compared to the Intel solution we suggest in the alternative choice, the AMD is slightly cheaper too.
Memory
First Choice: Crucial 4GB kit DDR2 SO-DIMM PC2-6400 CL6UK Pricing:£32.23 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing:$54.99 (ex. Tax)
While we’ve seen that 4GB of memory offers very real advantages over 2GB, and for a nose over £30 this Crucial 4GB kit of DDR2 SO-DIMMs may be only PC2-6400 at CL6, but performance memory isn't needed here (especially not with the 5,400 RPM hard drive over the page).
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