Hey pd;
Don't get me wrong. I would spend the money if I needed too if there is definitely a quality of video and sound. Excuse me for being naive on certain things. Can you explain to me that since my mini ITX mobo is outputting my windows sounds and DVD and CD sound through the SPDIF that there is some processing involved on my mobo. I thought SPDIF is purely digital and the digital signal is sent to my Rotel receiver which then processes the sound. So when it comes to digital output the sound is only as good as the outside processor or the receiver. All my windows sounds, CD and DVD sounds play on my receiver and the HTPC is only connector to my receiver via SPDIF connection. So the built in sound chips on the ITX mobo resamples all the sounds from the CD, DVD and computer sounds if outputted to speaker out. But I thought with the SPDIF connector there is no resampling just the pure digital information. That is why I was not afraid to connect my Rotel receiver to that HTPC. Five years ago I would call a guy nuts to connect any computer equipment to thousand or tens of thousand dollar Surround systems.
I would definitely agree with you on the video aspect. The better the video card the better the output. Higher GForce card handle shadding, smoke and other terms like G buffer etc etc... But I was thoroughly supprised with the built in via of these new VIA board. Its tried a lot of built in ones and this is by far a clearest cleanest I've seen. It won't do double duty for 3D games thats for sure since I tried benching it using 3DMark. But for TV and DVD I don't know if you need all those. I'm still waiting for those ITX boards to come out with a 8x AGP slot. One nice thing the new versions have is a onboard connector to boot from compact flash. This even makes the format even smaller. Running an OS on a compact flash would definitely be very very fast but also kinda expensive. Even the new motherboards from AOPEN have tube sound tehcnology for processing sounds. Now thats nuts.
http://english.aopen.com.tw/tech/techinside/Tube.htm
Anyone wanna connect your power amps connected to M80s to the sound output of that motherboard.
Saturn
