yes, any HD5XXX up till the newest R9 should be able to bitstream both format natively. i'm personally using the lower end HD6-something-something and it does bitstream without much fuss.

can't say that much about the newer R7-260X though. if the R7 is plagued, then most probably R9 is also affected.
so much for going with the latest and greatest..
can't expect much, it's a gaming card anyway. gaming takes priority over everything else.

another thing does your casing allow full height cards?

if any of you guys are building a htpc, best to avoid the newer R7 and R9 series for now.

unless you're thinking of gaming on the htpc, such high specs would be a waste.
not to mention the energy usage

different people have (usually) vastly different opinions regarding AMD vs Intel solutions.
but one thing remain consistently true: Intel solutions are usually better in energy management compared to AMD. it's been that way for decades years.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i...ew,3521-18.html

so if you don't mind paying a couple bucks more for cheaper initial costs, get AMD.
but if you're planning to turn on the system for a few hours per day, the extra ~200W per hour, per day will add up to a substantial number at the end of the month.

tho it's not impossible to build a system capable of handling full HD material whilst maintaining ~50W (or less) power.

IMHO main question is whether you wanna do any gaming on it.
second question is whether you wanna run it for downloads or torrent or for any reason you want it to run >4 hours everyday.

because right now, even the cheapest dual core CPU is capable of decoding full HD. with the exception of perhaps the lowest powered atom/celeron dual core.

some people die die wanna have 6 or 8 core in their htpc without realizing it'll easily cost them an extra 4,000W a day to run it.

you planning on downloading torrent using the htpc?
if yes then get a cheap dual core processor. not necessarily an i3. a dual core pentium with a graphics card capable of hdmi bitstream might be better if you're into audio. refere below. cheaper electricity.

or if you don't wanna run it on days end, can always consider an i5, i7 or AMD multicore solution.

i do agree that onboard graphics while could bitstream hd audio, do sound lacking. blame it on jitter. as onboard graphics usually extract their clock frequency from the main processor clock, the clock sync mechanism is usually not good. we've tested side-by-side between onboard solution from intel and dedicated solution from ATI graphics and the dedicated graphics do sound better.

but the great thing about htpc is that it's upgradeable. and the upgrade path is freaking cheap.
if you find the onboard graphics to sound lifeless, you could always add a dedicated card. an ATI graphics solution that could bitstream hd audio could be had from ~RM100 (HD5450). better card from HD6XXX and HD7XXX series could be had for around ~RM200.

will depend heavily on your usage. if you're gonna use it for playing media and run it 24/7 for downloading, you would want a low power consumption htpc. a high speed processor with lots of lots of ram and high performance graphics would mean $hit for htpc. the main latency is from IO access. multiplied if you put in more than a couple of drives.

rather than scaling it based on specs, or price, it's better to scale a htpc on power. not processing power, but power consumption.
htpc could be scaled from 8W setup up to more than 200W setup. won't matter much if you run it for 2 hours a day watching movies. but if you turn it 24/7, it's the difference between paying RM1.7 to run it for 30 days, or paying RM43.2 to run it for that same timespan (electricity cost).

the r7 series used to have this driver issues with bitstreaming lossless audio. it's intermittent but it's annoying as hell.
gun to my head, i think the gtx 750 ti is better than the r7 or r9 series for htpc use. it's low power, doesn't require external power from psu (less strain on psu), better driver support, better video playback support, h265 hevc hardware acceleration, better processing power for video post processing algorithms, better madvr implementation and support.

it's better in a lot of aspects compared to r7 260 or even r7 265.

this graph don't mean shit if you don't pay for your electricity, but for the rest of humanity this must be considered.

less power, less heat output, less requirement for active cooling, less chance of heat related failure, higher reliability, less heat dissipation to environment, less cooling costs if you're in the same room.
it's extensively tested by anandtech. link here.

almost bought one for testing purposes. but jayacom quoted me pretty cheap price for 4tb drives. storage > audio. so went home with a couple more terabytes.
tho i have absolutely no idea if they're any good, if the audio is miles better compared to hd7790 or r7 265 or if they're crap compared to ati radeons. someone should dump RM500 and test them. i would, if i had my audio setup working.

main question is what you're gonna use them for. if basic media playback then surely you don't need to plug an 8 core (albeit 4 weak ones) amd bulldozer for it. but if the tiny server is expected to handle media playback, media server and transcoding then >4 core would probably help.

i have the atom d2800. it's pretty weak. dual core 4 thread, but don't expect it to do much background work simultaneously. you could run it as NAS, or media playback, but not both. and certainly not when playing back vc1 bdrips and handling parity calculation at the background.

if you're planning for a 24/7 media server + torrent + download + media playback and want it to run 365 day without burning through electricity, i suggest you take a look at the newer celeron J1900.
benchmarked to use less power compared to 32nm atom (n2700 included, probably even better than my low power n2800 also). some test shows it having comparable (or even higher performance) compared to intel avoton. and it's cheap to begin with. most board supports USB3.0 out of the box. easy to connect more hdd and expand the storage.

woh? those integrated graphics any good meh?
got people say those integrated GC sucks and must use dedicated gaming GC only will give very the best picture quality! the more expensiver the GC the more better they say! more expensive GC = better PQ.

not true ah? kah kah kah

Really meh?
I've been told you need Quad SLI gtx Titan or 4 way crossfire ati firepro to achieve maximum quality BD video playback. Like this one:


Only then can unlock best PQ. Not true ah? Kah kah kah

do you require HD audio bitstreaming capability?

do you believe dedicated graphic cards deliver better picture quality compared to integrated solutions?

depend on who you ask. kah kah kah
bet those that say yes have never seen the 4th generation intel 4400/4600 and the newer AMD APU in action.

if you explicitly require SATA hdd support and don't mind working with linux, this is also available:

much faster IO access compared to raspi, and has a gigabit ethernet chip. perfect for NAS purpose and download server. doesn't even have a heatsink.

similar power efficiency as raspi at ~4W

even the lowest end ati hd5450 will be able to do it.

i've used it for a number of years previously. it's one of the cheapest card that will bitstream hd audio.
no issue on the playback as even a low powered raspberry pi is able to handle 1080p movies. and that's a 5W computer.

depend on who you ask.

i had the ati 5 thousand series, ati 6 thousand series, ati 7 thousand series, had a brief time with the ati r7, got nvidia gtx6 series and contemplating to buy the newer gtx7. owh wait i do have a couple of those gtx7, albeit lower end not the recommended 750ti.