Hi guys,

Just thought I'd share my experience with a GeForce 8200 chipset and HD Freeview...specifically this board from Gigabyte http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2817 

We've previously been running the MA78GM-S2H board (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2814), which is AMD's equivalent to the 8200, found picture quality not too bad with Freeview, but the interlaced stuff especially TV3 wasn't very good, blurry etc, and the CPU usage was high. So we've been running the setup with an NVIDIA 8600GT discrete graphics card and all was good with CPU usage always under 10% on all channels with a crisp clean picture. We're using a seperate Media Portal TV server box with an HVR2000 TV Card.

So I setup the 8200 board with an AMD Athlon 64 LE1600 45W CPU, 2GB RAM, and gave Freeview a run. I'm using Power DVD 8 Ultra h.264 codec, EVR, hardware acceleration enabled, Media Portal RC2 on Vista 32 bit SP1. I used the graphics dirvers that came on the motherboard CD, and also tried updating to the latest NVIDIA driver (175.19).

Basically the results were not good, the picture would stutter and stop and break up. Audio was often out of sync too. CPU usage varied from about 20% to 55%. I swapped out the CPU for an AMD Athlon X2 4800+ Dual Core and it basically made no difference, except for the CPU usuage dropping by about 10%. The WMV HD 1080 samples from Microsoft played perfectly, but the results with Freeview were not good at all, so maybe this board can't handle H.264 decoding very well.

So all up a bit of a disappointment really, was really hoping this board would do the job. Has anyone else tried a GeForce 8200 board yet and had any success?