MSI 7411 Motherboard Sneak Peek (share your thoughts!) - Page 99

Hey guys,

I looked through the thread and searched, but I didn't see anything about this. Hopefully someone can help me out

I have the MSI board with the 7.1 pre-out card. Originally, I had Vista Ultimate installed, and everything worked fine.

Yesterday, I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit), and when it was done, I immediately noticed a huge change. ALL sound now comes out of the rear speakers.

If the sound it meant to come out of the front left, front right, or front center channel, it is now routed to either the surround left or surround right. This applies to television, Blu-ray, and HD DVD content.

The only change was the upgrade to Windows 7. Before the upgrade I was watching television, and everything was fine. I did the upgrade, launched Media Center, and the sound was messed up.

I have no clue how to fix this...but obviously, this is a major problem...

Anyone know what I can try to get this fixed?

RIGHT Click on the Audio/Speaker icon on lower right side of W'7 and choose Audio Panel [something like that] and the you will see "Speakers" right click and do a Setup of what you have 5.1 - 7.1 etc. And APPLY and make default.

Before my motherboard died yesterday, I had a similar problem with the 7.1 pre-amp card with Windows 7 64 RC. I found that in Windows audio settings, any bitrate above 24-bit/48khz would mess up the speaker mapping. If I remember correctly, main audio came out of the l-r surrounds, center channel out of the right speaker, lfe out of the left, etc.

Hey Guys,
This may a stupid question but can the sound card that MSI makes be used with different mother boards? I know it can be purchaed seperately but was wondering if it is compatible with all mother boards that have a PCI express slot.
Thanks
Nick

@baldychoko
No because it's designed to be used with the dae-3 digital amp that's integrated into the mobo.

Has anyone heard of a digital amp only card based on the DAE-3?
I'm not interested in the entire MSI solution, I already have a base system.
I heard there was a sparkle one, but from memory it was quite crippled....

No. There is currently only the MSI solution. The Sparkle card is the only other announcement I have heard of a planned product but it is only 25W x 5. JavaJack may know of other planned solutions but he would be under NDA and not able to discuss them.

What's his background, he's just some dude that tested the MSI solution isn't he?
Doesn't mean he'll know anything about any new DAE-3 based cards...

He works for AMD and worked very closely with D2 on the audio portion and probably also worked with MSI.

LOL okay, that's a pretty solid back-ground

Answering my own post

Here's how I got my AC97 front panel jack to work in Win7. It's easier than it sounds.

*** Strongly suggest that you always set a restore point before making any changes. This utility makes that a little easier sevenforums.com/tutorials/494-system-restore-point-shortcut.html

Install audio driver package from MSI Live Diva disc. (the board works fine with the default Win7 driver, but as far as I can tell, you need the version that's on the disc if you want the feature below)
After installation, right click on the new red speaker icon in notification area, select sound manager.
In top right corner of sound manager app, click on folder icon. (hover label reads connector settings)
Check box disable front panel jack detection, which will *enable* an AC97 jack which doesn't have the automatic detection feature of the newer HD-type jack.

To direct audio output to the jack. (every time you want to use phones)
Right click white speaker icon in notification area, select playback devices. (you can get to the same place from the red speaker icon as well)
Select the jack item. (on mine it had a headphone icon, suggest you change the text label to something descriptive like front headphone jack)
Click on set default.
To change back to the amp, reverse the above procedure.

While I'm here, I'll recommend Media Center Studio (formerly MC Menu Mender) adventmediacenter.com. It allows editing Media Center's bloated menu structure. The software is Beta and somewhat quirky, so as I noted above, be sure to create a restore point before making changes. Use is mostly obvious, click on "start menu", hover over labels to see activation check boxes. Drag icons from one strip to another, deactivating them first seems to help sometimes.

DR

Hello. Hope somebody could give me some clue on this.
I have been trying to get this work for several days now.

I have comcast DCH3200 receiver with coax spdif output. I connected that to the boards SPDIF coax spdif input and installed Vladd's software but i can't route audio to the 5.1 amp card.

If i can't get Dolby 5.1 i am assuming i should get atleast a stereo audio to the 3 front speakers right?

The problem is i don't get any audio at all. any help is greatly appreciated.

The DCH3200 outputs Dolby Digital. The SPDIF input will only accept a PCM signal. You will have to use the stereo RCA output of the DCH3200. I have the same STB series and I have not found a way to get it to output PCM only.

I have to say I am joining the ranks of people that are disappointed in this board. The 1st board worked great for 10months and dropped the D2 audio chip. Got the board RMA'd and it took me about a month to actually find time to put the system back together.

It was good news initially, the board was working great in my basement, spent 3 days configuring Sage and the OS, Anti Virus, codecs, ect. Everything was ready to go, powered the system down, ate some dinner, remembered one more thing I wanted to do, powered the system up. NOTHING, ZILCH, NADA the system would not post. I tried everything under the sun, removed the amp board, cleared cmos, removed the battery, ram. Changed the psu, nothing I did made a difference. 3 whole friggin days and I have another brick.....

I really liked the board when it worked, but I have to say now I am pretty upset, great concept.... Poorly executed by a subpar quality vendor.

Sounds like the board I've aquired.

If it's the same as the one I've got the psu wont turn on with it all plugged in. However if you unplug the 4 pin 12v cpu supply on the motherboard the psu starts.... obviously still with no post.

So far, with some help I've traced it to the mosfets in the vrm circuit.

When I get home I hope to get some new ones and replace them all. We'll see what happens after.

The first board you had sounds like it had the diode problem discussed earlier in this thread.

Either msi have been unlucky with the quality of components they've had or they've really been cutting it fine with tolorences... my guess is probably a bit of both.

Another possibility is that this thread is giving a misleading impression. Without some sales figures we have no way of knowing the proportion of failed boards, which could be a typical rate.

Here's a list of electronic stuff that's failed on me during the past 20 years, just off the top of my head: 2 MBs, perhaps 6 hard drives, 1 modem, 1 IDE controller, 2 power supplies (one of them took out a MB), an AVR (prompting the purchase of the Diva), 2 VCRs, 1.5 :-) satellite radios, 3 CRT monitors, 1 printer, 2 mice, 1 keyboard, 1 RPTV, 1 12 portable TV. Only 3 repairs in that lot, the rest were scrapped. So if my Diva craps out tomorrow, even though I'll be tempted to think that it was higher risk, I'll instead assume that it was just one more of many things that failed.

On a different subject - has anybody successfully navigated the $20 rebate maze? The claim site won't accept any combination of numbers from the board label as a valid serial number, and the advisory web page shows a different format of label. I put in a request for advice from MSI, but fear that I might not live long enough to receive a response.

DR

a quality dedicated digital amp, in standard PCI/e form, from major vendors like Asus etc, would be a real game changer imo.

I'd love to see that.

If the design requires the 2 slots (as the MSI one does) then an included flexible cable would be a much better option than requiring a specialised motherboard.

Hi again,

I've almost decided my HTPC components, buy I've a problem with the case because it can't exceed 120mm in height and 390mm in depth.
I've only found 2 cases here (Spain):
* Moneual Moncaso 312 (a bit tight in depth)
* Aopen HT80D
The first one can mount a standard ATX PSU, but is too expensive (~300€ including PSU) to me.
The Aopen one mounts a 275w PSU (~180€). There's a 375w version, but the spanish distributor tought that this is oversized for a HTCP and decided not to import it.

Is a 275w PSU enough for the following configuration?
MB: MSI Media Live Diva w/5.1 channel 100watt amp,.
CPU: AMD Athlon II x2 240 (I'll try undervolting) with Sythe Big Shuriken cooler
RAM: GSkill 4GB DDR2 1066Mhz Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBTD
HDD: WD Caviar Green 1TB
ODD: LG GGW-H20L

Hope you can understand everything, my english isn't as good as I would like to.

Thanks.

i'm going to pull the trigger on the 7411, i just have a few questions and if i could get some feed back on my possible build.
first the build:AMD Phenom II X2 545 Callisto 3.0GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 80W Dual-Core Processor,
CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply,
CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X4096-6400C5C,
nMEDIAPC Black Aluminum / Acrylic / Steel HTPC 5000B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case,
MSI Media Live DIVA 5.1 AM2+/AM2 AMD 780M HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
not sure on the hard drive yet, or the odd. if anyone knows of any new blu-ray/hd-dvd combo drives let me know. will i need any more heat-sinks or fans to keep this board running?
looks like win 7 is the way to go, but has anyone got linux or xp working?anything at all i should keep in mind with this build? also has anyone hooked up a phono pre up to the rca ins?
thank you

Here's the last thing I've seen (via Java Jack) regarding Linux compatibility.

"You can get 2channel audio with linux and there are graphics drivers on the ATI driver site.
multichannel audio on linux is being scoped out right now. No ETA on delivery yet."

from... http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1#post15650771

Well got the second board rma'd..... Hope it goes better that the last one.

I posted a few days ago that my motherboard had died. I have the 7.1 pre-amp version. I had found the computer hardlocked one evening, but on reset and after running chkdsk automatically, Win 7 came up normally and my wife and I watched a movie with no problems. The next day my wife used the remote to wake up the computer to watch TV, but she complained that there was no sound. I warm rebooted the PC, which oddly made chkdsk run again, and found the D2Audio interface missing in the audio panel. So I shut down the PC and checked to make sure that the pre-amp card was seated properly in its slot, at which point the motherboard refused to POST. After leaving the power supply unplugged overnight and trying again, the board did POST and all seemed well until I booted into Windows and found the D2Audio interface still gone.

I know there were posts earlier in the thread about the audio not working after a BIOS update, but I haven't updated the BIOS on my board and my audio isn't just not working, it's gone - not being seen by the motherboard at all. I have two audio interfaces in Device Manager - the ALC888 Realtek interface and the ATI HDMI audio interface. No D2Audio (yes, I did load the driver so that it could be listed as such rather than an Intel High Definition interface). I tried removing the Realtek device in Device Manager and scanning for new devices, but that didn't restore the D2Audio interface. I tried doing a clean install of Windows 7, but that didn't work. I loaded Ubuntu to run lspci -v and only find the Realtek and ATI audio interfaces on the PCI bus.
Are the stereo RCA jacks on the motherboard (as opposed to the PCIe pre-amp card) connected to the Realtek interface or the D2Audio? I thought those were on the Realtek, but I tried and can't get any audio out of those either. The front headphone jack does work.

I'm not sure where to go from here. Is there anything else I could be missing before I RMA this board? Is there perhaps an option in the BIOS setup to disable the D2Audio part that may have inadvertently been checked? I have been following this thread and I did search previous posts, but of course I could have used the wrong search terms. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Squinty read pages 92 and 93 of this thread, there's posts by jens and adelaar concerning the D50 diode on the motherboard connecting power to the D2Audio chip.

Read Adelaar's faults, they seem to be very similar to yours and lastly maybe have a look at your motherboard and see if you can spot the "pimple" on the D50 diode, it's very small so you maybe would need a magnifying glass.

If your diode has failed and your within warranty then it's RMA time.

Ah, thanks for the pointer. I did kind of look around for the D50 diode when I was checking the seating of the pre-amp card, but I wasn't sure where to find it. I'll look more closely. In any case, it sounds like I'm going to have to deal with Microstar for an RMA. Yuck.
Thanks again.

Hi Squinty,

The diode is seated next to the amp card slot (see picture in my post on page 92) and if it`s faulty you see a little dot on the top side, it`s tiny so you have to look close.

You can test this to post without the plug on the amp card end then put it back in, if the board hangs it`s prob. the D50 diode.

I wanted to replace the diode myself but i send the board back for rma, when i change anything on the board the warranty expires......€180,00 gone then....

New board up and running for a week now with Windows 7 final and so far looking good.

I have a new diode here, when this board breaks with the same problems i`m gonna replace it.

Regards
Adelaar

4th board (actually 2 boards which failed 1 or 2 times) is running for a week now on windows 7. Fingers crossed.

btw: I am pretty anoyed by the lack of decent subwoofer throughput. Anyone got a tip how to conquer this?

yeah I use ffdshow, in the audio config. I figured out a while ago that when you set the D2Audio properties in windows to 5.1, it expects 5 channels, plus LFE information to send to the .1 (sub).

So if you have a stereo source (music) then this provides no LFE stream and you get no sub, the way to get round this is to route this stream through ffdshow where you can re-enable the LFE and setup the crossover frequencies. (I also found channel delay useful but this may just be my setup).

The advantage with using ffdshow is the ability to setup different audio profiles, so you could have it not running for movies etc, or just have it running for mp3 and flac files if you wish.

Hope this helps

Also you need to set the speakers to small in windows properties and select bass management and set the crossover there.

It sounds very good with all this completed. Let me know if you want more info. I use mediaportal to playback music..... it's easier to integrate the ffdshow. :-)