So, I wanted to replace my 630I board, but wanted to stay mATX.

I picked up an Asus P5E-VM HDMI. It's got the G35 chipset, with on board vid. That obviously includes HDMI output. And DirectX10!(not that it could use it).

The best part is that it's good for 500+FSB. I was only able to hit 455, but that was my RAM holding me back. Hey, it was $23 per stick... I'll have some D9's coming soon.

I wish it had two PCI slots instead of 1X PCIe slots, but you can't win them all, now can you?

For $150, I'm still mixed on it. That could be a P5K. But then again the only advangae to that would be the extra PCI slot. And you'd have a full size board without HDMI...

Hmmm...

I'll update when the good ram is in. This chip should be good for ~4Ghz on air (L629A).

That sounds pretty sweet!!!!

It's about time somebody put out a decent mATX board for overclocking. Can it be OC'd via bios, or are you using a software OC?

Certainly expands possibilities for a HTPC build with every benefit other than game play.

All through the bios my friend.

I reallly wish it had 2 PCI so I could Raid my IRAMs, but hey. We'll see what it can do anyway.

And I've seen pics of a Gigabyte board with 2 PCI.

I was looking at that board last week and the 1 PCI slot was the first thing I noticed as well. If I were making a HTPC I would want two so I could have a TV Tuner Card and a better Sound Card installed at once but maybe the Realtek ALC 883 sound processor is good enough... I would have to hear it first though I suppose.

IIRC the latest Ati tuner comes in x1 PCI-E. The ALC883 is pretty good. The M2A-VM HDMI I had had that.

Good to know. It's about time they started making use of those x1 slots since they've been around for a while now.

Also, the last time I heard onboard sound from a good set of bookshelf speakers was back in the AC'97 chipset days and it was pretty bad IMO.

New ram on the way. Hopefully here Monday.

Should do ~1200Mhz.

Here's to hoping that was my bottleneck.