Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD AMD RS690 w/ HDMI

[W1zzard]

Sapphire's latest motherboard is based on AMD's RS690 chipset which features integrated VGA and HDMI output onboard. The board is an excellent choice for media PC systems since it is MicroATX and supports audio via HDMI. Performance is almost equal to much more expensive RD580 motherboards, the BIOS also has a load of overclocking options.

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[pt]

1500ht link, that's when i start to get instability on my foxconn, have you tried lowering it to get more fsb?
still 300 is a great achievment

 

[dmce]

Thanks for this folks. Especially the 1080p bit. Need to give the review a proper read seeing as the HD bit looks like it might be an option.

Does the sound chip matter if the sound is going via HDMI or digital out?

 

[wiak]

just a little tougt on the "1080p Playback" segment
what decoder did you use?

and

Our suggestion for smooth 1080p playback would be at least an Athlon64 3800+ processor, better a 4000+. Since our player/codec is single threaded there is no benefit from going dual core in this case. This may change with different codecs/players.

3800 singelcore isnt that good ^^, X2 3800+ is right in the alley
you might want to test with CoreAVC & ffdshow both have smp support
and there is more trailers to check, apple.com/trailers has many 1080p trailers and they are in h264 codec to
use QuickTime Altenative to download them

Thanks for this folks. Especially the 1080p bit. Need to give the review a proper read seeing as the HD bit looks like it might be an option.

Does the sound chip matter if the sound is going via HDMI or digital out?

if the sound goes thru hdmi it will come out of the tv's speakers, if it goes out spdif you can connect that to a spdif enabled surround ampifier
and this looks like the Realtek ATI HDMI Device driver is used for this bit, lol they released the hdmi driver awhile before the amd's chipset, so it was no suprise to me that the amd chipset had hdmi

 

[dmce]

if the sound goes thru hdmi it will come out of the tv's speakers, if it goes out spdif you can connect that to a spdif enabled surround ampifier
and this looks like the Realtek ATI HDMI Device driver is used for this bit, lol they released the hdmi driver awhile before the amd's chipset, so it was no suprise to me that the amd chipset had hdmi

My question was worded poorly. If passing sound via digital out (Spdif bracket) does the chipset for sound matter? Providing its bit perfect it shouldnt? Im not sure if this still applies, but do we still have both DD and DTS to consider? Are both supported.

Similarly, if using HDMI to AV box or tv, does the audio chipset matter? I appreciate where the sound goes but my question relates to audio quality.

 

[Zubasa]

Looks Promising
I guess this is going to be my AM2 board.

 

[wiak]

My question was worded poorly. If passing sound via digital out (Spdif bracket) does the chipset for sound matter? Providing its bit perfect it shouldnt? Im not sure if this still applies, but do we still have both DD and DTS to consider? Are both supported.

Similarly, if using HDMI to AV box or tv, does the audio chipset matter? I appreciate where the sound goes but my question relates to audio quality.

huh?, it will just pass thru digitaly the signal from file on a pc to ampifier when using the spdif/hdmi thingy
and the Dolby Digital Live option will encode any format from windows to dolby digital so you ampifier see it as a dolby digital signal
the audio quality is same as orginal as far i know when sending via spdif digital, its not done analogy its done digitaly right from the source
DVD > Dolby Digital > DVD playback software > spdif > realtek HD soundchip (spdif) > spdif out or hdmi out
this is done digitaly and in 01010100101 form so it has no quality degrading

 

[dmce]

huh?, it will just pass thru digitaly the signal from file on a pc to ampifier when using the spdif/hdmi thingy
and the Dolby Digital Live option will encode any format from windows to dolby digital so you ampifier see it as a dolby digital signal
the audio quality is same as orginal as far i know when sending via spdif digital, its not done analogy its done digitaly right from the source
DVD > Dolby Digital > DVD playback software > spdif > realtek HD soundchip (spdif) > spdif out or hdmi out
this is done digitaly and in 01010100101 form so it has no quality degrading

Thats what i was asking. Any and all spdif outputs are bit perfect then? I thought this was not the case due to the windows OS and kmixer resampling. So i was wondering about this audio chipset. Will do a bit of hunting around.

From what i can tell ALC882D copes with bit-perfect output.

 

[rhythmeister]

I only just saw this board, nice review...as usual W1zz! Who sells them in the UK tho?!

 

[rhythmeister]

BUMP to try and find out where I can get one in the UK...

 

[suraswami]

Nice Article W1zzard.

Quick question. I can watch 1080i broadcasts thru my PC with the HD tuner on my monitor with AGP X1600 PRO and X2 3800 at half the speed (because of cool 'n' quiet) (running @1300 Mhz from 2600Mhz) with out any slutter or lag. Is this any different than watching 1080i or p recorded movie? I was hoping to use a single core S754 3400 overclocked to 2.67 ghz and the X1600 pro with another HD tuner on my HTPC. If this is the case I might have to re-think about doing this.

 

[rhythmeister]

STILL trying to locate one in the UK! Ebuyer have the baby brother of this board but not this one. Sapphire "support" forums are as useful as a chocolate teapot as well, the idiots...

 

[wiak]

heres my preformace of hd dvd playback on my K9AGM2-FIH
http://nwgat.wordpress.com/2007/08/04/htpc-update-3/

 

[dmce]

heres my preformace of hd dvd playback on my K9AGM2-FIH
http://nwgat.wordpress.com/2007/08/04/htpc-update-3/

Had a look at ur blog. I couldnt post a comment though.