I've had a computer hooked up to my television for as long as I've had a living room. What would eventually be called a home theater PC had humble beginnings, starting its life tasked with simply playing movies and MP3s before eventually morphing into a personal video recorder and an occasional game box. Before long, living room gaming duties were offloaded to consoles, allowing years to pass with nary an upgrade to my media PC. So long has it been since I last cracked the case that a thin blanket of dust has draped itself across the system's internals, making the now-vintage hardware look all the more old and decrepit.

The HTPC market has exploded since I last built one. What was once an expensive accessory confined to enterprising geeks and do-it-yourself enthusiasts has moved into mainstream living rooms. And thanks to the relatively modest requirements of multimedia playback and recording, even today's budget hardware is up to the task—hardware like AMD's new 780G integrated graphics chipset.

The latest fruit borne of AMD's purchase of ATI packs a DirectX 10-compliant graphics core pulled from a Radeon HD 2400 graphics card, decode acceleration for HD DVD Blu-ray movie playback, second-generation PCI Express, Hybrid CrossFire, a new SB700 south bridge, and a Phenom-ready HyperTransport 3 processor link. All that's coming to motherboards that should cost less than $100. Alongside it, AMD is introducing a new energy-efficient Athlon X2 4850e with a 45W TDP and $89 price tag. New hotness all around
The 780G is a new chipset from its integrated graphics processor through the north bridge and all the way down to the south bridge. Of those components, the IGP is perhaps the most exciting. Dubbed the Radeon HD 3200, the integrated graphics core is ripped directly from the RV610 graphics processor that powers the Radeon HD 2400 series—a chip that was released just eight months ago. That's incredibly quick trickle down from budget GPU to integrated graphics chipset, making this the first IGP we've had that's really in step with the current generation of discrete GPUs.

Because it's a member of the same graphics family as AMD's discrete GPUs, the Radeon HD 3200 is also eligible for Hybrid Graphics configurations. The chipset's GPU can be teamed with a single graphics card—in this case either a Radeon HD 3450 or 3470—to improve performance in 3D applications. Hybrid CrossFire only delivers performance gains when GPUs of relatively similar horsepower are combined, which is why the Radeon HD 3200 IGP will only work in conjunction with the HD 3400 series of discrete GPUs.

Within the integrated Radeon HD 3200 graphics processor lies a unified shader architecture that spreads 40 stream processors across two shader SIMDs. Also included are single texture and ROP units capable of handling four texels and pixels per clock, respectively. The vertex and texture caches are shared to save die area (they're separate with most other R600-based designs), but the Radeon HD 3200 is still very much a DirectX 10-class part. If you think of the new Radeon HD 3800 series as a V8, the 3200 is essentially a single piston—one that runs at an impressive 500MHz and has access to up to 512MB of system memory.

Thanks to the 780G north bridge chip's HyperTransport 3 link, which scales up to 1.8GHz with AMD's current Phenom processors, the Radeon HD 3200 enjoys a very fat pipe to two channels of DDR2 memory at up to an effective 1066MHz. Motherboard makers can also equip the 3200 with dedicated memory of its own, an addition that AMD says can improve performance by 10-15%. Such support for local memory in an IGP isn't actually new, but it's a capability rarely exploited by motherboards that show up in retail. AMD claims tier-one mobo makers are, er, onboard to take advantage of it this time around, though.