Digital Rants

So I got new parts for my lounge room HTPC last week, they are:

1. 450W "Corsair" HX-450 ATX Modular Power Supply
2. Pentium E6300
3. Palit GF 9500GT PCI-E 1GB 128-bit DDR2
4. Asus P5KPL-1600

I guess my previous blog on this subject matter isn't detailed enough. So I'm expanding.

Follow up:

The PSU works ok, I don't think 450W is really that necessary because there's very few components in the HTPC. But I chose that model because it's the cheapest modular PSU available in stock in Perth right now. Not having a bunch of messy cables really make the internals neater. The PSU fan is an intake too, so it is pretty quiet. I like this PSU, might considering getting this again if my other PSU conks. I love the packaging!

Pentium E6300, again the cheapest bang for buck chip I think. It is surprisingly good, at ~$115 per chip, it's pretty cheap. Low temperatures, low profile heat sink and quiet stock CPU fan. It's pretty decent as a HTPC CPU.

Palit GPU, again the cheapest fan less card with HDMI output. This card will not make a sound as there are no moving parts in there. I could have gone for something more expensive (DDR3 RAM etc), but for video duties I think this should suffice. This card supports VDPAU video acceleration and MythTV's Advanced 2x de-interlacing. Strange thing though I have supplied a 50hz modeline, xvidtune sees it as 50hz but both nvidia-settings and my TV reports 60hz. Motion is a lot smoother than before so I ain't complaining, but will be good if I can get pure 50hz working. Needs to see if xine has VDPAU acceleration too. Took me a long time to google on the Internet to determine if this card has the connections to carry digital sound over HDMI. It does, and I'm glad that it worked. The cable is included too (nearly threw the cable away as it's tucked in a tight corner). The manual is lousy beyond comprehension, but overall the hardware is pretty good.

Ah, the motherboard. I struggled over this one. Full sized ATX boards is a prerequisite because it meant I wouldn't be restricted when it comes to future expandability (no uATX or any other baby form factors for me). As a media player I don't need tons of bells and whistles so this board fits the profile. Sadly the Intel G31 chipset lacks VT-x support. This means I cannot use hardware virtualisation to run a secondary OS for playing Windows games. I guess it's a compromise, because VT-x enabled motherboards costs $100 more. This m/b has audio on board and it's using the VIA VT1708B chip. For some reason ALSA 1.0.19 only detects the analogue outputs and not the digital one. The problem is fixed when I upgraded ALSA to v1.0.20.

The connection between the Asus motherboard and Palit video card is done via a cable. One end plugs to the graphics card. The other end of the cables are two pins. I connect the +ve pin to the SPDIF pin, and the -ve pin to the SPDIF ground. Not sure what to expect, I fired up alsamixer and unmute the digital output. No smoke. That's a good start. Tried to play back some music, the application crashed (that's bad). Tried playing a movie, it worked! I got digital sound from the HDMI cable! And TV recordings worked too! So now I have one less connection to deal with and I can remove the sound blaster audigy from the HTPC too. One less component in the HTPC = one less RF noise emitting device.

I used to hear some noise when I'm faat forwarding or rewinding. These noises are gone now with the new hardware. Very cool ! One thing I wished I had done is to twist the digital cable to cancel out crosstalk. I guess I will do that when I remove the Audigy sound card.

Four cheap things by itself still add up to one giant bill . But I finally bite the bullet and done it, and I'm very happy with the result. Video playback is a lot smoother now. HDMI audio seems to glitch but I suspect the HTPC is running some disk intensive stuffs in the background (needs further testing).

The old HTPC hardware now becomes my office computer. My old home office computer will be retired. It's my first computer in Perth (carried over by my parents from Singapore) and has served me well over the years. This computer that cost ~$1.5k is now replaced by $400. How prices have dropped.

Note to self. Put up more pictures. My blog is so boring without pictures. I promise I will do more next time.