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?