Aaron Ledger

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Make sure to hit the drive up with some simultaneous viewings too!

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I think I hear the sound of Taps gently playing in the background…

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Are you using 64KB clusters? If not, it might help your situation a little if you are finding excessive fragmentation degrading your HDD performance.

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Well, code is dead now. Guess that saved me from spending money 

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Must buy now!!! 

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Have you looked at our review? Perhaps the photos there will provide a decent illustration for you.

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i3 would be needed if you are doing CPU-intensive tasks. The early word we have seen so far is that the Sandy Bridge Pentiums look good as far as the core HTPC playback functionality is concerned. If you are doing something like commercial skip analysis or 2D to 3D conversion, something with more CPU horsepower would be a better choice. The Pentiums also lose out on Quick Sync that is in the i3 and up, but you have not specified transcoding as something you’ll be doing.

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Definitely check out Secondrun.tv which Mike reviewed.

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I don’t know exactly what the USB device you have does, but you mentioned that it converted audio to 5.1 (which is consistent with Dolby Digital or DTS and not simply Dolby Surround encoded stereo audio). It very well may be just sending stereo. You’d have to hook it up again and see whether your AVR detects as DD.

The stereo sound coming from Netflix or VUDU is most likely 48kHz. They definitely aren’t sending down 96kHz. You can set the output audio to 96kHz, but that’s just re-sampling the audio which isn’t going to result in any improvement, but it is fine to leave it at that setting.

The reason why it sounds better is that your AVR ProLogic IIx does a better job at creating a more convincing surround sound for you than the USB device.

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The Intel DH67GD board (review) is a better choice for HTPC. It should be more power efficient, it has an Intel NIC and it has a CIR header.

You can get away with as little as 2GB of RAM. However, try to get a 2x2GB kit because the pricing is not much more and it will add a little bit of performance.

The heatsink you found appears to only be LGA775 and the G620T is LGA 1155. You may want to consider one of the HDPlex chassis options.

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For your needs, the new Intel Sandy Bridge Pentium parts may be a good solution. The G620T paired with an H61 or H67-based Intel-branded motherboard should give some great results when it comes to power consumption and heat (or lack thereof) as well as taking care of the other tasks you mentioned. The Intel board also will have an Intel NIC which is preferable. If you get the H67-based Intel board, it will have the Consumer Infrared (CIR) header for connecting an internal IR receiver.

You should only need a discrete GPU for the Intel parts if you need 24p output and you aren’t willing to disable UAC. AMD boards will probably have one of the 42xx IGP parts which are not as feature-complete as Intel IPG. Specifically lacking with AMD are support for 3D material, advanced de-interlacing and audio bitstreaming capabilities.

The pico should be adequate if all you are powering is the motherboard, processor and a couple of drives. If you do want to go with an ATX supply, most decent supplies should be quiet when you are just using them for HTPC duty since they are nowhere close to a load where the fan would have to spin faster. The pico will be more energy-efficient compared to ATX supply.

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We are hosting the guides and patch files on MissingRemote if you want to perform the procedure once again.

Win7 RTM

Win7 SP1

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Your AVR probably doesn’t process the LPCM (7.1 audio input) when it is received and instead, directly outputs to each speaker with amplification. This means it is relying on the source device (your laptop in this case) to perform the processing.

By outputting only stereo, the AVR is able to process the audio. In this case, you are using ProLogic processing to produce audio for all of your speakers.

When you used the USB sound device, it also was doing some sort of processing and apparently creating a Dolby Digital mix for your AVR. This is inherently at a disadvantage compared to sending the original decoded stereo audio to the AVR for processing because the USB device is processing the audio and re-compressing it into the DD output. The additional compression cycle is always going to damage the audio in some way. It is possible it may not be noticeable and/or the processing in the USB device is superior to the AVR. It probably is not the case though.

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Thanks for sharing the interesting information.

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Thanks for posting the picture – it looks like it would fit into my living room well.

Here’s the message I get when trying to view your report:

 

This Page is Not Accessible to the Public

You do not have permission to view this report.

 

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