X48 Delayed Again, P45 updates, Intel DHCAT, and some G35/RS780 news.....

Just some musings from around the lab......

 

Intel X48 -

 

According to several motherboard manufacturers, it now appears that final X48 silicon will not reach the suppliers until early to mid-March.  All indications are that X48 products will not be in the retail market until the later part of March now.  This is an abrupt change from the expected release of retail product later this month.  However, considering the number of dates we have been given on this program, it's not surprising we have yet another schedule change.  In their defense,  Intel has just said Q1 as of late, but we know from Internal documents that Q1 originally meant January.  Oh well, it gives us a little more time to play with NVIDIA's upcoming 790i besides reporting on some interesting P35 and X38 boards coming to market at the lower end of the price scale.

 

Intel P45 (Eaglelake) -

 

Our sources tell us not to expect the next generation mid-range chipsets from Intel until the "Computex" time frame now with variations of the chipset like the G45 possibly coming a little later in the summer.  We originally expected an early Q2 time period based off previous discussions but it appears to be late Q2 for product announcements now and shipment of the P45.

 

Intel G35 -

 

We have been busily testing the ASUS P5E-VM HDMI board and will have our first look ready in a few days.  The board has been extremely stable in a variety of test scenarios and is certainly one of the better uATX format boards we have in the labs now.  In fact, the board is basically at the top of our list for an SFF HTPC buildup with very good video playback capabilities via the native HDMI port that includes the ability to output up to 8-channel LPCM audio (24-bit 96kHz).

 

The multi-channel audio output via HDMI is something our AMD 690G, NVIDIA GeForce 7150, and NVIDIA GeForce 7050 boards are not capable of at this time.  In fact, these solutions are limited to 2-channel LPCM output.  You can always get multi-channel output via the on-board audio solutions but that kind of defeats the purpose of using HDMI if you have an multi-channel audio setup available.

 

However, with all good things comes trouble it seems in the search for a perfect HTPC solution.  Basically, I turned into a blubbering idiot (more on this in another article) trying to get this board to work right with a variety of A/V receivers such as the Onkyo 805/905 series, Yamaha RX-V3800, Denon 2808/3808CI, and the Pioneer Elite VSX-94TXH with the released G35 drivers.   The core problem was the lack of multi-channel audio over HDMI in most situations, especially when playing back HD-DVD or Blu-ray titles with the A/V receivers acting as repeaters in our setup.  2-channel LPCM worked perfectly every time, multi-channel LPCM worked sometimes, and it seemed as if the Yamaha and Pioneer receivers had the least amount of problems in this area but would still fail at various points in testing. Dolby Digital and DTS generally were problem free for us but since the board is only HDMI 1.2 compliant, HD audio schemes needed to be decoded by PowerDVD 7 Ultra and passed on as multi-channel LPCM.  Of course, then you end up with the infamous PDVD downmix (16-bit 48kHz) that basically ruins the audio experience for us. 

 

Intel recently released a beta set of drivers (15.9.0.1414 - Vista) to us that has basically solved the majority of our repeater problems and includes full MPEG-2 hardware acceleration.  H.264/AVC hardware acceleration is not available with the G35 chipset, we will have to wait for G45, but with a reasonable CPU like an E6550, the H.264 playback experience is not bad at all.  We are in the middle of testing Nero Showtime v4, CoreAVC, WinDVD, and Arcsoft with this board and will report on our results in a separate article along with alternatives like Media Player Classic and the required programs to go along with it.

 

Intel Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool -

We have been working on a quick review of Intel's DHCAT version 3.0 program using the G35 chipset as our base line configuration.  Until we have some results with the new E8400 CPU, we wanted to bring you our thoughts on this program.  We have been extremely impressed with the latest version of this unique tool that assesses your system's multimedia capabilities.  The new version 3.0 program addresses about 95% of the problems we had with the 1.5 and 2.0 releases, mainly the previous requirement that your system needed a TV tuner card and media server software installed and working perfectly before the tool would generate its results.  The program still requires you have a current DivX video codec and a commercial MPEG-2/H.264 decoder installed prior to running the tool.  However, most multi-media users will already have these programs, and if not, they can be procured inexpensively. 

 

The program is extremely simple to run with an average test run taking around 30 to 45 minutes depending on your system configuration.  The tool will generate a platform capabilities score total along with results in five sub-categories that includes H.264 playback. An upcoming patch to the program will allow users to upload their scores and compare their results against other Intel based systems via an online results browser (ORB).  The group behind this program consists of some of the brightest personnel you could hope to meet and they all share a passion for improving the digital home platform.  It's this type of passion that lead to the creation of this tool and we sincerely think it is one of those hidden gems in the software world.  Besides providing some extremely useful feedback as to how well your Intel system will run various media types, this tool is absolutely free.  We highly suggest you visit the Intel DHCAT website and order your copy today.

 

AMD RS780 -

 

We have our first RS780 samples in-house for testing.  Overall, we have been very impressed with the board's performance, video quality, and options.  We will have a further look at this chipset in the near future, but for now, this chipset and a Phenom make for a very good HTPC setup.  However, we are still bummed that the audio out capabilities across HDMI are limited to 2-channel LPCM with the current driver set.  Also, Hybrid CrossFire is not working quite right but AMD has a new driver set coming shortly.  About the only problem we have encountered during stress testing has been with the new SB700 Southbridge and Vista 64 as shown below.  It might be sometime before the review is ready based on our disk transfer tests.

 

 

In all seriousness, it is difficult to gauge at this time whether we really have a SB700 problem or one of many Vista surprises that we seem to run into on a daily basis.  Look for our preview shortly!