The Demo Site

about 2 weeks ago, I pieced together some old PC parts I had (and a few new parts) to make a full time media center pc for my TV. I shouldve waited a few weeks, if I had, I would've seen this Gigabyte motherboard on Newegg.com, The GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H. What is so special about this motherboard? well lets see. What I had was a Pentium 4 3.0 processor, 2 gigs of ram, and a harddrive. My purpose was to build a Media center PC that had HDMI out and 5.1 optical out. Right now, I just wanted to play media files and view web video content on my LCD TV, but I wanted something that would be good enough to support a Bluray movie playback if I decide to get one later on.

This Gigabyte board would've saved me a bit of cash. First it has built in, a better video card than the one I bought, a Radeon hd 3200 with VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs (I bought a Radeon HD 2600). The second reason is sound capability. Built into the motherboard is 5.1 outputs via Optical out. Most motherboards have some sort of 5.1 output, but not optical out. I bought a separate sound card just to get the optical output. So with this board. I couldve saved about 80 bucks on the video card and sound card.

Well not exactly.

Like I said, I had a Pentium 4 CPU. This board supports AMD processors, so I would've had to buy a processor. The upside is that the processor I would've bought would've only cost me about 60 bucks and would've been a better processor than the P4 I have in my machine. Overall, I would've got more performance for less money.

The GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H is $79 bucks at Newegg