Intel drops the ball with Win7
I decided to upgrade my HTPC to Windows 7 Release Candidate today, and it all went very smoothly – about 15-20minutes from reboot, through install, and being at the desktop. I needed to grab my TV tuner drivers, but everything else was picked up and working – fantastic!
My HTPC is "powered" by an Intel G45 (x4500HD), which boasts a ‘powerful video engine provides users with a rich, new media experience to deliver smooth HD playback without the need for add-in video cards or decoders’. It also mentions stuff about Bluray playback, so it sounds perfect for building a HTPC with, right?
That would be all good if it was true… but when I tried to play back any of the high def stuff I have encoded in h.264, WMP informed me that there was something wrong with my graphics card! Then I started noticing other artifacting in Windows obviously caused by the graphics card.
I decided to hunt down the latest Intel WDDM 1.1 (that’s what Windows 7 uses, after all), only to discover Intel have not made any WDDM 1.1 drivers available for download. Argh! It’s a good thing they would have had no idea that Windows 7 was coming out, otherwise we’d be able to blame Intel… oh wait!
Given Intel move at glacial speeds, there is no way I can even hope that Intel will have drivers out (that work!) by the time Windows 7 is finalised and goes on sale. I’m going to buy another graphics card for the HTPC. So dear reader(s) – any suggestions on a passively cooled NVIDIA or ATI video card for my HTPC, going for under $70AUD?
I bought a cheap little ATI 3450 512MB from Newegg for $20.99 after rebate, which was passively cooled. It also has HDMI which is nice as well. It plays back x264/wmvhd/AVHCD fine for me. If you are looking for something to get you by until Intel wakes up, this will work.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121302
Any sort of guess as to how much Win7 going to cost upon release?
@Luke: I ended up picking up an ATI 4550 – it is passively cooled too – waaay nicer to play with than Intel! I’m in Australia, so no newegg/rebates for me though ;)
@Matt I’m guessing much the same as Vista pricing, but I don’t think its been officially announced yet.
I feel your pain with the G45. My notebook has that chipset, it took eons and about 8 driver releases on windows update over a period of 4 months before the artifacting finally stopped happening. I will never buy anything that has intel graphics again, and I go out of my way to make sure noone I know does either.
Cheers