ASUSTek Motherboard M3N78-VM

[jdeslip]

Well, the color isn't completely off. It just looks like dropped from millions of colors to thousands. Like the menu shadows and stuff look off.

[nkrumm]

update:

after reading too many posts about fullscreen XBMC troubles with the 8200IGP, i'm nearly to the point of choosing the gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H intel board with 9400 graphics built-in. which costs 50-70 dollars more, and i cannot use the low-power AMD 5050e

barwin-- have you tried fullscreen 1080p playback in XBMC? you seemed to have great success with mythTV, and hdmi/1080p in general. I'd be interested to hear what happens...

thanks
nik

[barwin]

update:

after reading too many posts about fullscreen XBMC troubles with the 8200IGP, i'm nearly to the point of choosing the gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H intel board with 9400 graphics built-in. which costs 50-70 dollars more, and i cannot use the low-power AMD 5050e

barwin-- have you tried fullscreen 1080p playback in XBMC? you seemed to have great success with mythTV, and hdmi/1080p in general. I'd be interested to hear what happens...

thanks
nik

I'll try it out tonight - I have tinkered with XBMC a little. It works as a frontend for MythTV actually ... I LOVE the interface but as a mythtv frontend it was lacking some important features like automatic commercial skipping. I don't recall testing 1080p content. I'm a bit curious myself about how it'll perform. Will let you know!

Btw, that Gigabyte board looks awesome. But that is indeed a bummer that you can't pair it up with one of the low wattage processors, and a further bummer that it costs so much more than the m3n78-vm. I'm liking AMD at the moment but if I were doing Intel I'd certainly consider that board.

Also, there seem to be a few boards out there with the nvidia 9300 that are a tad cheaper than the 9400 ones. If those are also rumored to have good performance with the particular setup you're shooting for, might be a good way to shave $15-30 off. This thread that had a couple recommendations.

Cheers,
-Ben

[nkrumm]

... But that is indeed a bummer that you can't pair it up with one of the low wattage processors, and a further bummer that it costs so much more than the m3n78-vm. I'm liking AMD at the moment but if I were doing Intel I'd certainly consider that board.

Also, there seem to be a few boards out there with the nvidia 9300 that are a tad cheaper than the 9400 ones. If those are also rumored to have good performance with the particular setup you're shooting for, might be a good way to shave $15-30 off. This thread that had a couple recommendations.

Cheers,
-Ben

did some more research:
Regarding the power consumption: the E5200 Wolfsdale core-- although rated 65W-- is actually a 45nm chip, and has some of the lowest idle/peak power consumption scores out there. So that is enouraging. see here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu..._12.html#sect0 (granted, no 4050/5050e in the mix) and here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...er,2259-7.html (5050e vs. E7200)

Another option does seem to be the asus p5n7a. about 15 dollars cheaper, as you mentioned. the 9300 IGP is fine, im sure, but check out the last graph here: http://www.trustedreviews.com/mother...-E7AUM-DS2H/p4 not sure how legit their review is, but 55W (gigabyte) vs. 70W (asus) is a huge difference. Another comparison (no methodology) here http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post15356946. Also, the p5n7a northbridge gets quite hot and some people have had overheating issues. The last thing i want to do is add additional fans to keep some integrated graphics chip cool!

so many considerations!

ps
sorry to hijack the thread :-\

[barwin]

did some more research:
Regarding the power consumption: the E5200 Wolfsdale core-- although rated 65W-- is actually a 45nm chip, and has some of the lowest idle/peak power consumption scores out there. So that is enouraging. see here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu..._12.html#sect0 (granted, no 4050/5050e in the mix) and here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...er,2259-7.html (5050e vs. E7200)

Another option does seem to be the asus p5n7a. about 15 dollars cheaper, as you mentioned. the 9300 IGP is fine, im sure, but check out the last graph here: http://www.trustedreviews.com/mother...-E7AUM-DS2H/p4 not sure how legit their review is, but 55W (gigabyte) vs. 70W (asus) is a huge difference. Another comparison (no methodology) here http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post15356946. Also, the p5n7a northbridge gets quite hot and some people have had overheating issues. The last thing i want to do is add additional fans to keep some integrated graphics chip cool!

so many considerations!

ps
sorry to hijack the thread :-\

So I tried XBMC w/full screen 1920x1080 and the results were pretty bad, unfortunately. Now, I'm a newb when it comes to xbmc so who knows if I'm using the most optimal settings, but I did go in and select VDPAU for video playback (which works great on the same machine w/MythTV) and 1080p playback was non-watchable. Picture was there, but slow/delayed/choppy, sound was messed up, etc.

I tried watching some SD content as well, and the picture was completely jumbled, though audio seemed to work just fine.

If I were to spend a few hours with it, I'm sure I could figure out more. I don't think I will though since MythTV does the trick. If there is a particular combo of settings you want me to try tho, I'd be happy to give it a shot.

BTW those comparisons on the processors and boards is quite interesting. Good finds! Going with the low power consumpion / low heat is definitely the way to go especially if the price hike is only $15ish - you'll make that back in saved energy costs in no time

[nkrumm]

as i expected

you could try the patch from motd2k (xbmc dev for vdpau) http://xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p...&postcount=966 (also more info in that thread, it seems to be a driver issue).

OR per http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...6&postcount=31 start in windowed mode and then fullscreen the program.

and some info that is over my head right now here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...=131715&page=3

anyways, thanks for all your help and testing!
~Nik

[jdeslip]

So, has anyone out there been able to get front audio to work on this board?

[jt_04]

I got HDMI audio to work with the M3N78-VM and MythBuntu 8.10!

wow it works! thanks for the directions! all i had to do was upgrade my alsa driver. i'm using Jaunty with M3N78-EM with a Nvidia 9400 GT.

now i just have to figure out the right modeline for my sony bravia 40".

[yzf600]

I got the analog audio to work on this board with Intrepid using alsa instead of pulseaudio.

So yesterday I upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty. I also upgraded the nvidia drivers to 180. Now my sound is broken. It seems as though the upgrade installed pulse again. All I get is some crackly sound out of the speakers. I tried to remove pulse and go back to alsa (esound), but that resulted in no sound at all. It seems as though everyone here has gotten pulse to work with this board on Jaunty just fine.

Can anyone with this board who runs Jaunty (9.04) post their contents of /etc/pulse or ~/.pulse directory?

I'm really frustrated as this is my HTPC. I can't watch jack squat without sound!

[yzf600]

I ended up installing the 9.04 from scratch on a new drive. Audio worked perfect.