Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds

The Second Try: NVIDIA GeForce 8200

Shortly after building the system I received an ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI based on NVIDIA's GeForce 8200 chipset; seeing as how the NVIDIA GeForce 8200 chipset supports 8-channel LPCM audio over HDMI, it seemed like a better solution for my needs so I gave it a try.

Power consumption under load remained unchanged however at idle the GeForce 8200 system pulled significantly less power. This didn't jive with Gary's power consumption numbers, but apparently there may be some issues with the ASUS motherboard inconsistently supplying CPU voltage resulting in power consumption that ranges from significantly lower to on par with the AMD 780G chipset.

Other signs that the GeForce 8200 isn't ready for prime time included basic stability. During its tenure as my HTPC motherboard the Gigabyte 780G never crashed on me while watching a movie, however a few minutes into me playing around with Jet Li's Fearless and the system bluescreened on me. I haven't been able to get it to crash since, but stability is of the utmost importance.

The ASUS GeForce 8200 also spins fans attached to it at faster speeds than the Gigabyte 780G, not because it needs to, it just does. We've already made ASUS aware of the problem, which apparently happens on at least one other 8200 board according to Gary.

Installing the Scythe Andy Samurai Master on the ASUS board proved troublesome, the Socket-AM2 heatsink clip interferes with the heatsink on the chipset.

There's also a good deal of noise coming from the voltage regulators whenever there are certain types of disk accesses. The motherboard emits a high pitched sound in sync with the disk accesses that seems to be worse when using the Supertalent SSD vs. the WD 1TB drive. It's by far the loudest thing about the system when in a case.

The final complaint I have about the GeForce 8200 is the least scientific; for whatever reason the system feels slower at navigating through Media Center than on the 780G. I have to switch back to the AMD 780G to be sure, but it definitely feels like it.