Motherboard etc

While I was at the Computerfair purchasing the tunercard, I thought it best to scope out some of my other components for price etc...

While reading some forum or other, I’d learned of a new wave of mobo’s coming out which are specifically designed for HTPC’s in that they are small form (micro-ATX), are designed to be “quiet and cool”, and best of all, have good graphics card built onto the board.

I was looking at Gigabyte boards (my usual choice anyway) and the current model is called GA-K8N51PVMT-9 and it has a built in nVidia 6150 graphics chip, and svideo output. These boards retail for around $170

I went looking for this board at the fair, but apparently they haven’t made it there yet, so no go on that one. (that’s bad).

They did however have it’s little brother, called GA-K8N51GMF-9, which has an nVidia 6100 onboard, which is fine for my purposes (that’s good!).

Unfortunately this board does not have and Svideo output at all, which is what I need to plug the pc into my TV! So it’s kinda redundant as I’d just have to buy a graphics card anyway (that’s bad).

But they did have another mobo made by “Elitegroup” (RS480-M?) which had onboard graphics (ATI flavour... X200 I think?) AND and svid output and that supports AMD chips, all for around $120 (that’s good!) I’ve never had experience with this make of boards, but apparently they’re not too bad, so I may end up going with this one, but I’ll see what boards come out in the next few weeks...