Introduction

The Digital Home experiment has been going on for quite some time now, even Intel tried this with its Pentium D line. While Digital Home is a great idea, it simply wasn’t feasible with processors of the day. Intel’s Pentium D line simply consumed too much power and produced far too much heat to even be in the running for a Media Center PC and AMD’s K8 needed a better chipset than what was on the market. Given AMD does use a lot less power than that of the Pentium D, it still chews up too much power to really sit in a 24/7 PC.

Times have changed. Core Architecture from Intel now gives the ViiV platform the option for the Digital Home, with Core Duo the biggest plus for the HTPC - a notebook grade CPU running on desktop components gives it a real thumbs up. AMD isn’t that far behind with its Athlon 64 Energy Efficient ranges which operate at lower core voltages and output less heat than the standard range.

Today we are looking at a motherboard from ASUS which is designed to take on the Digital Home on the K8 front on the AMD Live! platform. Paired with nVidia’s GeForce 6150 chipset, this baby is a feature packed setup. How will it perform compared to our Foxconn motherboard based on the same architecture?

Let’s have a look!