HTPC setup

I chose a board that had about everything you could want- but I don't know that I would recommend it. There's an Abit board- the NF-M2- that has everything this one does- It has both VGA and DVI on the motherboard, 4 DDR2 slots, SATA, RAID, etc. The potential advantage is that it has optical in- and out- on the motherboard. My Asus supports SPDIF-out only- and that's with an add-on bracket (I happened to have it already). An the Abit the chipset is by RealTek- instead of the very flaky SoundMax junk on the Asus. The Abit doesn't have component output, which I wanted in my setup. If you don't need this, then I'd recommend it over the Asus N2MPV-VM. From what I can tell, the driver support is much higher for Abit- many LINUX users run it. My Asus also had a burned out CPU fan header (the board is made in China, not Taiwan), so I had to disable CPU fan speed monitoring and run the CPU fan off one of the case headers. I may send it back, I dunno.

On my Asus board, I had to completely reinstall Windows because I updated drivers and then the audio was no longer recognized. A total reload.. of everything. I'm in the middle of it now, taking system restore checkpoints with every successful install of a driver.

If you want to follow along, I'll describe the steps.

After installing the components, set the following BIOS options.

• S3 Suspend. This needs to be turned on if you want to use suspend to RAM *before* you load windows.
• Enable HD Audio.

Then you can install Windows. I decided against Vista obviously, and I don't think there's anything I want in MCE, so I'm using XP with Service Pack 2.

After you load up windows, stick in the Asus disk and do an install all of the drivers. This seems to be the critical step, as that HD Audio needs to be enabled.

Once it works, then we need to get updated video drives. The updated nVidia drivers give the option to adjust the TV output correctly. It gives you a new option in the control panel. It also allows me to set the resolution to be 1360x768, which is almost the native resolution of the projector so that scaling need not be done.

Since I went dual core, there are some special optimizations to let windows really use it properly. Dual-Core X2 Optimizer driver and Microsoft Windows HotFix #KB896256 for Cool 'n' Quiet was recommended by BruceK. The latter patch allows the PC to lower its CPU multiplier if it doesn't need it (runs slower and cooler). There are a zillion 'Hotfixes' listed which could apply. I don't recommend loading anything because of the stability of this board. One of them is a fix for Windows HD Audio driver. I think this is the reason my sound was trashed. Apparently, Microsoft shipped a 'time bomb' code by accident- some binary component of their high definition audio crashes after 2004, or some junk like that. I think it is the precursor to the poop that is Vista 'protected' content. There's a patch to undo the patch, etc., but it's better not to mess with any of it.

Do a system checkpoint so you can get back to this point. For me, right now, I have 5.1 sound and component output.

The next step is to install the ATI drivers for the HDTV wonder. There are *many* pieces of software for the ATI setup, but ATI's software isn't very good. In fact, it is bad, which is why we're going to use a 3rd party PVR (personal video recorder) software.

• Install HDTV Wonder driver (only)
• Install HDTV Card

Load the ATI HDTV wonder driver. And that's it. Then, shut down, insert the card, and reboot. You should see everything recognized in the device manager properties.

My next post will be about HDTV tuner software. It is proving to be painful.