The promise of an HTPC in every couch potato’s lounge room dates back to ancient times, when Harry Potter didn’t have stubble, high definition was a grade at school and 5.1 speakers were seen as a luxury. So why is it that we’re yet to see a HTPC in the home of a person who doesn’t have the albino tan of a technology lover? Regardless of the fact that HTPCs are still a long way from hitting the mainstream, the industry is forging ahead with silicon designed to offer the best HTPC experience. The ASUS M3N-H/HDMI motherboard is one such component, based around NVIDIA’s new GeForce 8300. The GeForce 8300 is NVIDIA’s answer to the popular AMD 780G chipset, the current HTPC chipset of choice thanks to its excellent integrated graphics performance.

NVIDIA refers to the GeForce 8300 chipset as an mGPU, short for motherboard GPU. It contains all of the logic to look after the regular motherboard duties, as well as a discrete graphics solution based on the standalone GeForce 8400 architecture.  Let’s take a look at the more interesting stuff first – its ability to pummel polygons and pixels alike.

While it might not be up to speed for the latest DX10 games (all three of them), movie lovers will lap up the chip’s support for NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD acceleration. This offloads most of the load from the CPU to the mGPU, allowing stutter-free Blu-ray viewing. When we put the M3N-H to the test with Edward Scissorhands, CPU utilisation hovered around the 20% mark, only a few per cent higher than AMD’s 780G chipset. This is outputted via a HDMI 1.3a output, which can also carry 8-channel LPCM bitstream audio (unfortunately TrueHD and DTS-HD are not supported... yet).

Gaming performance isn’t quite as impressive as video decoding though. Even when running at an eye-straining resolution of 800 x 600, today’s games don’t so much crawl as they collapse in a wheezing, sweaty heap. It must be said that the 780G chipset suffers from the same lacklustre gaming performance. However, if you do choose to install another NVIDIA graphics card for the occasional bout of big-screen PC gaming, it’s nice to know that the mGPU will contribute to the load thanks to NVIDIA’s Hybrid SLI. Just remember that the standalone card must be around the same speed as the discreet solution.

As far as the usual mundane motherboard duties, the GeForce 8300 chipset offers PCI Express 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, HyperTransport 3.0, DDR2 10066/800/667, 6 x SATA 3 ports and a whopping 12 USB 2.0 ports. Not bad considering all of this, as well as the Blu-ray friendly graphics processor, is packed into a single chip with passive, silent cooling.

We were a little surprised to see ASUS favour a full-sized ATX layout with this board, as most HTPC owners prefer the smaller Micro-ATX form factor. Still, by doing so there’s plenty of room to move though we would have liked the RAM slots to be a few millimetres further away from the CPU socket to accommodate a larger, quieter heatsink. As usual with ASUS boards, we appreciated the multitude of features that actually come in useful, rather than being mere bullet points on the box. The Q-connector makes hooking up front panel ports a much simpler job, while the Linux-based Express Gate allows basic web surfing and Skyping without a lengthy boot into Windows.

While the BIOS offers basic tweaking options, it appears that squeezing so much functionality into one chip has resulted in a lowly overclocker. We managed a paltry 5% increase over the standard front side bus, regardless of how lovingly we tweaked the limited voltage options.

When comparing the feature set and performance, the ASUS M3N-H/HDMI measures up nicely against 780G-equipped boards proving that NVIDIA is on the right track with its new chipset. Unfortunately a quick price check on statice.com.au shows that, at around $150, the M3N-H/HDMI is 50% more expensive than the 780G-powered boards. Until it can reach the same price, it’s a nice example of NVIDIA’s ability to catch up, albeit at a prohibitively expensive price.