Bit-tech published a three way shootout of Home Theatre PC motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. Here's an excerpt:

As it currently stands, none of the solutions are good enough to deliver smooth playback in protected Blu-ray and HD DVD movies - only the MSI K9AGM3-FIH comes close but there's still not enough processing overhead spare to make it a good solution. You could buy a more powerful CPU, but that gets rid of the attractiveness that draws you to the AMD solution and if you're going to splash the cash you might as well buy a discrete graphics product that offloads all video processing from the CPU: using either ATI's Avivo HD or Nvidia's PureVideo HD video processing engines. Integrated graphics is not really designed for gaming; I don't care what the graphics boys try to claim. In this respect, I don't really care that Intel's gaming support is exceptionally poor on its integrated graphics solution when you consider that the video output quality comes by the bucket load. But what good is its output if it can't actually play HD DVD and Blu-ray discs back in a watchable manner? We find ourselves in catch 22. In addition, for the £40 extra Intel charges, why not just buy a discrete card for the same price and drop it in the MSI?

If you're not concerned with investing in expensive High-Definition players (well, less so expensive these days) and only want to play back HD content from other sources like WMV9HD or h264(or x264) then all will certainly offer a very capable HTPC for all HD video that isn't very high bit-rate h264. Every chipset seems to have its niche performance, but all perform around about the same when you look at the bigger picture. What's surprising is that even though the Nvidia-based solution from Gigabyte has absolutely no hardware acceleration, it still manages to outperform the Intel G35 in terms of lower CPU usage in quite a few cases. But why care if the output is utter tripe?

Most will still prefer to buy a CE device instead for Blu-ray or HD DVD, as there are features on these just won't be available on a HTPC. Things like Deep Colour support (when disc authors and TVs start making use of it) and also lossless audio streams such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS MasterHD audio. At the moment the S/PDIF loop back from the HD audio chipset is limited to just standard DVD quality Dolby Digital and DTS.

The MSI K9AGM3-FIH, when combined with an Energy Efficient Athlon 64 X2 5000+ is the most inexpensive solution with silicon-level HCDP and HDMI support and also good quality sound and video outputs - all of which just sweetens the deal. Of course, it doesn't support the faster 125W CPUs, but then for under £40, we don't expect it to. While it's not the absolute best solution if money was no object, it is the cheapest and still packs a pretty heavy punch.

The Gigabyte board may have a fully featured rear I/O, the best onboard sound of the bunch and if you were unaware of the difference in video quality output, it would probably suffice. However as it stands we cannot recommend it for a HTPC - it's not a bad board, but that doesn't make it the right solution here.

Finally, the Asus has the best features - plenty of upgrade potential, tons of overclocking options, plenty of SATA, all solid capacitors, high quality power regulation and the best quality of video playback quality we've seen from an integrated graphics processor. However it's marred by inferior sound, a much higher price and no actual noticeable video offloading performance enhancement compared to its Nvidia-based competitor from Gigabyte. It not only has far more shader horsepower and clock speed, but it also has more specific video acceleration components - but none of this seems to be used.