1. Start company
2. Fail
3. Get government bail-out
4. Profit!

This chipset seems almost too good to be true. I wanted one for a HTPC, but I am also looking at getting one for a NAS too. The main attractions are the built-in Radeon 3200 graphics with HDMI, DVI and VGA output, the six SATA ports and low idle power consumption (measured at 32W by SPCR with a good PSU).

The Radeon 3200 is fully capable of decoding H.264 and VP-1 video, meaning even a slow CPU can cope easily with 1080p Blu-Ray and MKV rips. My next post will cover using that in more detail. HDMI output on the board is really handy as it is the best way to connect the system to a TV, and it supports audio over HDMI so you only need one cable which can be 10+ meters long. In practice, it works really well, the only down side being that my TV does not auto-switch to HDMI like it does with RGB SCART.

I read that the on-board might not support 7.1 output, only 5.1 over HDMI. I have not tested it, although it seems to be a bit of a moot point because if you have a 7.1 system you probably have a receiver which can decode Dolby Digital and AC3, so you would pass that through anyway which definitely does work. Otherwise, the PC can decode 5.1 to 6 digital audio streams and pass them over HDMI.

Six SATA ports are obviously ideal for a NAS. In tests they seem solid, and support AHCI mode as well as native SATA and legacy modes. One thing I did notice is that in AHCI mode with Vista power management (spin-down) does not seem to work. In native SATA mode everything is fine. SATA seems to have a low CPU overhead, and supports various RAID functions (although I never use on-board RAID).

All boards with this chipset I have seen run passively cooled. The northbridge heatsink gets hot to the touch, but not worryingly so. Combined with a good PSU, Ninja CPU cooler and suspended 2.5″ HDD the system is almost totally silent. Quieter than my XBOX, in fact, which has a modded fan.

AMD is on to a real winner here. Good performance, rock solid stability, good drivers (hi nVidia nForce) and an abundance of features.

If this quote doesn’t get you to read it, I don’t know what will: “SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”

He points to Trent Reznor’s conclusion as the logical way forwards: “[pirates] weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose.” Indeed, just because someone downloads your game/movie/music/book doesn’t mean they would have bought it. As Reznor and many others have discovered, giving away your material for free actually tends to increase sales. After all, I don’t imagine NIN’s latest four CD instrumental album gets a lot of radio/MTV play, so how else are you going to promote it?

Wardell makes another very good point too – that it’s better to make games which run well on the majority of people’s hardware, rather than aiming for the almost mythical hard-core gamer with a top-spec PC. While most gaming and hardware sites are pretty hard-core, most potential customers are not so it makes sense to give them something that doesn’t make their two year old PC look inadequate. Wardell’s comments seem to be born out by his sales figures.