Asrock ALiveNF7G-FullHD motherboard

For fifteen hundred bucks, you can pick up a top quality standalone Blu-ray player, which will do a fine job of playing Blu-ray movies and... playing Blu-ray movies. Or, using this motherboard as the backbone, you can whip up a nice little HTPC for five hundred dollars less, capable of playing Blu-ray movies and... watching HDTV, acting as a PVR, operating as a music server, surfing the Net and many, many other tasks. As an APC reader, we’re pretty sure which option makes the most sense to you.

Considering it costs less than three new release DVDs, we were rather impressed by the goodies that Asrock has packed into this motherboard. Sure, the chipset might not be cutting edge, using the NVIDIA GeForce 7050 / nForce 630A MCP combination. Considering this was released waaaay back in July of last year, it’s certifiably ancient if you’re the kind of techno-snob who upgrades every other month. But for the rest of us, it’s built on proven technology that is just fine for playing high definition movies and decoding DivX files. Because it uses DDR2 memory and an AMD CPU, you can load it up with a couple of gigs of memory and a mid-range CPU for around $350.

It’s already got onboard sound and video, so all you need is a case, PSU, hard drive and Blu-ray drive to build the perfect HTPC. The GeForce 7050 graphics chipset isn’t going to cut it for games, but thanks to its support for PureVideo acceleration there’s more than enough grunt  for 1080p movie viewing. Unfortunately the Realtec ALC662 onboard audio is lacking Dolby outputs, with an optical output sorely missing. However, you can enable HDMI audio via the DVI-D output, but you’ll need to purchase an adaptor to do so.

In fact, the board is lacking any built-in HDMI outputs, but you can always resort to a DVI-D to HDMI adaptor if your chosen display device doesn’t support DVI-D. There’s also not a lot of room for expansion, with only one PCI Ex x 16 slots, one PCI Ex x1 slot and two PCI slots. Four Serial ATA ports should be more than enough for a couple of optical drives and a couple of extra large hard drives, but don’t expect to build a file server with this mobo.

For a hundred bucks there’s really only one major complaint we can level at the feature set of the Asrock; to be the perfect HTPC board it needed a built-in HDMI output for video and an optical output for the audio. Sure, you can get around these problems with adaptors, but you can also buy similarly priced boards that have both of these outputs.

We’ve also got one other major complaint to level at this board. When testing motherboards, 95% of boards are happy to work straight out of the box. The remaining 5% decide they’d like to torture the APC staff, refusing to boot. They’ll occasionally spin up the CPU fan for a few rotations, maybe even boot into the Vista install screen... and then bless the reviewer with a timely Blue screen. This motherboard is a perfect example of this evil 5%. Even after three rebuilds, using entirely different components, except for the PSU and optical drive, we couldn’t get this thing to do a clean install of Windows. It was only after swapping out the perfectly functional SATA optical drive with an IDE version that the problem was fixed. It was an extremely strange issue that left us wondering how much Q&A testing goes into such a cheap motherboard. Exactly nil squared by the looks of it.

Performance wasn’t exactly stellar either, being one of the slowest boards we’ve seen in a while, but considering we’re not planning on hosting a Crysis server on this thing, it’s not going to affect our movie-viewing experience.

Thanks to a great price and decent onboard video, this motherboard isn’t the worse backbone for a HTPC that money can buy. The problem is, it’s also not the best; we recommend you throw another $50 or so into a slightly better motherboard with the necessary outputs. Hopefully you’ll also get something that’s a tad more reliable for the price.