*Official* Asus P5N7A-VM uATX HTPC Motherboard Thread - Page 5

I just installed my new motherboard today, but have encountered issues on what is being reported by CPU-Z for the RAM. I have 2x2GB of Crucial Ballistix 4-4-4-12 (2.0V) DDR2 RAM. I have an E7200 CPU with everything set to auto. The target RAM speed (according to BIOS) is 800MHz. The only change I make to BIOS is bumping up RAM voltage to 2.0V. Upon power-up, I look at CPU-Z, and it's got crazy timings! 533MHz and 15/15/63/63!! Not sure if it's being reported wrong by CPU-Z or not. I thought I read something on these forums about RAM issues, but cannot find it now. Anybody else have issues, or have suggestions? TIA!

Has anyone tried running this board with a power suppy thats less than 400 watts? There's some nice small cases that only have 270 watts included...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811121068

Hello,

I have just setup a P5N7A-VM with a Sapphire 4850 1GB video card. I have the HDMI running to my Pioneer VSX-84TXSI and then onto a Sanyo PLV-Z2000 projector. I have various other AV equipement connected to the receiver. I have a PS3 and an old HD DVD player connected. The problem I am experiening is that the PS3 and the HD-A1 both take up the entire screen the way they should. The computer however seems to only take up about ninety percent of the total screen. In other words the PS3 and the HD-A1 take up the entire screen the way they are supposed to. The input on the projector is not changing. I have tried the following to resolve the problem:

Tried different HDMI inputs to the receiver - no change

Tried different video card resolutions - no change to the actual screen coverage area.

Tried changing the projectors screen settings - this resulted in a change but I don't understand why I would have to do this is the input is from the receiver just a different source?

Tried outputing the HDMI from the built in HDMI - no change

Any suggestions out there as to a solution?

The solution was the scaling in the advanced settings in the ATI Catalyst Software.

Check to ensure your VMC resolution is the same as your desktop resolution. If they are different, the PC might be switching between the two resolutions, which causes HDMI to resync.

Awesome, keep up the reporting. I have two of those boards too...the only one I do not have is the 9300.

I got a similar ATX case, with 275 Watts. I'm having a problem with the HDMI picture flashing in and out when I plug in USB drives. I can't tell yet whether its the PSU or a driver issue. It works fine when I use DVI--> HDMI.


That's a good idea, but alas, this is independent of VMC. It happens when I'm just on the regular screen. I'm thinking of uninstalling all the drivers I got off the internet and installing what comes on the DVD. Any other ideas anyone?

hrmm...
well, I've been working on it constantly the past couple days and have tried variations of the following:
Codecs - have tried Powerdvd8, Nvidia purevideo codec, Mediaportal's built in codecs, ffdshow.

Rendermode - VMR9 Renderless (VMR9 Exclusive in Mediaportal), EVR - both produce tearing (and in theory shouldn't)

If I use ONLY hardware acceleration, the tearing isn't as bad, however if I enable ffdshow for resizing/post processing then the tearing is extremely bad.

The real kicker for me here is that for years I've used ATI for my HTPC. I used to have a 6600GT and it did the same thing, however I NEVER had a tearing issue with ATI. Could it be drivers??? Should I use 59Hz or 60Hz for refresh?

ANY ideas are welcome. Normal DVD's have the tearing...Blu-Ray's play perfect.

thanks,

:EDIT: - just removed the 178 nvidia drivers that the nforce driver pack installs with this board, and installed the beta 180.43's and the tearing issue is nearly gone (still occasionaly slight tearing - nothing like before). The picture also looks MUCH clearer (it was what I would consider poor quality before. noisy, rough, LOTS of mpeg artifacting around all the edges). So if anyone else has a similar issue, try the new beta drivers as they're a night and day difference for my setup.

[quote=makryger;15047063]I got a similar ATX case, with 275 Watts. I'm having a problem with the HDMI picture flashing in and out when I plug in USB drives. I can't tell yet whether its the PSU or a driver issue. It works fine when I use DVI--> HDMI.

Thats why i was asking, the manual says the board requires a 400 watt PSU.

Looks like thats why your having issues.

I'm running a high-eff Seasonic 330w just fine without problems. E8400, Crucial 4GB, 1TB Seagate, all passive cooling.

ASUS P5N7A-VM motherboard connected via HDMI will not boot with Panasonic PT-AE3000.

It works fine with Shape Aquos.

Ugh. Thanks for the information, Kajel. I must have missed that part of the manual. As Quantumstate suggested, just because they test it to work with one wattage, doesn't mean it won't work with less. I'm sure they build in a little leeway, but I was worried 275 W was cutting it close. That's what I get for purchasing a $50 case! (Apex DM-387)

So I guess I'll try getting a new PSU, if I cannot find one with these really weird dimensions. I emailed the company that made the case to see if they offer any higher wattages. I also noticed that the Antec Minuet 350 case has almost the exact same skeleton as the Apex one, but it has a 350 W PSU of the correct dimensions. I'll email them to see if they can sell the part individually.

Thanks for the input!

I got my board and build done this weekend with this, and so far am very impressed with the board. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 Interpid 64bit, with a goal of doing Mythtv with all the fixin's. This is my first move away from Fedora for Myth as I've done Myth on Fedora now for about 5 years (man is it light years ahead).

Myth SPDIF passthru works fine, as does mplayer with -hwac3 as an option, but I cannot get system sounds to play. I've messed with every combination of changing conf.modules options, goofing with alsaconf and .asoundrc settings, and mixer settings and dang if I can make it work. Are any Linux users of this board having success getting system sounds to work? I'd dug through alc888 postings on ubuntuforums and other google searches and the whole thing is evading me. I'm far from a Linux n00b. :-)

Uhm, sounds weird if it requires 400w! Personally i've bought a 280w, it's not assembled yet, so I can't really say anything yet.

I will be running E8400, 2x2gb, 500mb wd green.
//m

Page 1-37 in the manual says 400 watt psu

You can reference it also at this url

http://support.asus.com/download/dow...ge=en-us&os=24

Okay after a night long battle with my board, here's some more observations:

- Added note on the installation. This board is a little smaller in footprint than my p5q-em, so the edges of the board does not rest on a case stand.

- My CPU temps were much higher than i expected (about 10C higher than on my p5q-em). Turns out it was a loose CPU HSF connection, which also seemed to help with the reboots somewhat.

- Undervolting works great! Was able to run my board down to about .95V or so. VDroop isn't too bad on this board with a range of about 25mV between idle and full load.

- Overclocking / underclocking is really ****ty! The menus are just abysmal and i could not get a good manual setting between FSB / Mem w/o the system complaining about overclocking it (even at the lowest setting it failed!). If you're contemplating anything from stock, forget about it! Best you can do for underclocking is to lower the CPU muliplier and that's about it. My 500MHz mem sticks are now crippled at 333MHz.

- Speaking of overclocking, i was playing around with the mem and as someone noted above, something quirky is happening with the timings. No matter what i input into the timings, it seems the BOS overrides it (even though it supposedly accepts it). I am getting very strange mem readings like:



I wonder if this is one of the open memory bugs plaguing the chipset, and somehow related to the failed bootups i'm experiencing.

- Since I'm using old school YL 120mm fans, I still have the older 3 prong fan pigtails to connect to the mobo. Although the fans read fine, I'm having trouble controlling them from the CHASS connector inside of SPEEDFAN. Going to have to experiment more to see if i can get it to work.

- RAID configuration was a nightmare. I was importing my 5 Seagate 1.5 TBs drives i had from my P5Q-EM system and even after full configuration, Vista wouldn't see it! I installed, reinstalled, deleted, reinstalled the RAID partition in both the BIOS and Vista and the nVidia RAID manager kept on saying i did not have a RAID drive! After many excrutiating hours mucking around with drivers, RAID settings, and BIOS settings, I was able to make it work after making the drives AHCI disks at first, partitioning / formatting them, then deleting them, and finally reallocating them as RAID drives! Jeez, nVidia could you make it any harder?!!! With Intel's ICH10R, RAID setup was a breeze... Anyhow, I'm in the middle of transferring over 6TB of backed up data now with no glitches (seems a little more stable than P5Q-EM, as long as i don't reboot!).

- Lastly, Blu Ray playback....in a word, FLAWLESS! After mucking around the past year with 680g, 780g, 630i, G35, and G45 chipsets, the BD playback worked right out of the box with my old PDVD7.3 player...no hitches, hiccups, stuttering, etc. I'm very anxious to see some of my BD reference titles (kung fu panda, speed racer) on the 9300 again!

In a nutshell, MCP7A is as advertised: a great HTPC platform for viewing HD material. However, it looks like nVidia / Mobo OEMs still have a bit of tweaking to do in the BIOS as it seems more of a BETA release at this point. The periodic reboot issues are annoying as hell, the overclocking options are lackluster, the memory issues are perplexing, and the RAID configuration process is inexcusably complex. However, once you get past all of these problems, the BD playback is just about perfect and the best I have seen to date!

Choosing between the Asus intel G45 or the nVidia 9300/9400 platform is kind of a toss up at this point:

- With the G45, everything (RAID/Overclocking/Memory/etc.) works great, except for the BD playback itself with its stuttering, lack of 24p support, backwards compatibility, etc.. Recent BIOS and driver updates have rectified this to an extent, but its still noticeable and waiting for the right drivers is a hit and miss affair.

- With the 9300/9400, the whole chipset seems to have been released as ES units plagued with memory, RAID, BIOS, etc. issues. However, once you get passed all of these problems, the BD playback is second to none! With the history of how frequently Asus updates their BIOS (and seeing how this 9300 board seems to be made for big OEM partners with its LPT1 / COM ports on board), I'm sure we'll be seeing fixes for all the problems soon.

Hey guys,

Is anyone still having problems with restarts/reboots? At certain times I've noticed CPU utilization is 49-50% when my pc is idle. When I check task manager or performance/reliability monitor in Vista System PID 4 is consuming all the CPU util. Is anyone familiar with this process? If you google PID 4 System Vista there is quite a bit of information about this and CPU utilization. I'm starting to think maybe there is an ethernet driver problem.

Edit: I forgot to mention when this high CPU utilization is occuring I have restart/reboot problems. The system appears to shutdown but power stays on, fans still are running, there is still HDD activity, but there is no video. I cannot get the system to recover unless I press reset.

This might be just Vista.

I had reboot problems, until I put a decent heatsink on the chipset.

This never happened with my former motherboard running Vista. The system does not restart/shutdown on it's own, it is only occurring during user initiated restarts. I am just not comfortable with the high CPU utilization when there is nothing going on, or that I can pinpoint.

I really want this board but can't find anywhere selling this thing as a motherboard/cpu combo. This is my first HTPC build, I'm confortable installing anything but a CPU, maybe cause I've never done it before.

Do you guys know any place selling this as a combo CPU/MB already burned and tested? Also how hard is installing a CPU?

Thanks for any help.

I'm probably not the person who hsould be commenting on it, since my setup is kind of screwed up right now, but CPU instlation is really straight forward- open up the assembly, place the cpu you in the only way it can go in, and close the assembly. Then put HSF on top.

in fact, putting together a whole PC is quite simple. It's choosing the wrong components that can doom you to failure

My board is running just awesome. Possible because i didn't install any of the Asus utilites, (just Pc probe)? Have you tried removing Epu-4 engine?

I originally installed the EPU-4 Engine, but since removed it. I happen to have the EXACT same problem on shutdown! I click on my vista ultimate 32-bit to shutdown, it initates the process, screen goes dark, but everything stays on like you stated.

Couple this problem with the wacky data being reported by my RAM, and it's becoming fairly clear that I am being punished for being an early adopter!!

Update: Now when I wake from S3 sleep, my ethernet port needs to be refreshed. Shame on you nVidia.

So a few of us have reported that our PC's won't shutdown completely or won't restart on occasion. Someone even mentioned that they had to pull the plug to resolve (I have a reset button that works; my power button does not). I've traced this issue down to whenever I run CPUZ, the issue always happens. I haven't spent time looking at other similar utilities, but can anyone else replicate this?

I'm looking forward to a BIOS update that will hopefully solve this and my RAM timing issue.

CPU installation is very easy. Quick google and you'll find lots of sites showing how to do it.

Otherwise, buy from a local PC shop and they can put it together for you.

It will also not boot with Panasonic PT-AE2000 when connected via HDMI with Windows XP SP3

I had never built a PC before and had Vista installed and running within 4 hrs of opening the first component. I was moving pretty slow and careful. The CPU installation itself was easy - it just drops in. The heat sink installation was the scariest (but not that difficult). I used a Scythe Mini Ninja heatsink and Arctic Silver 5. Between the Arctic instructions and ones supplied with the CPU (maybe Scythe?), it wasn't that bad.
http://www.arcticsilver.com/ins_rout...2intelas5.html

Definitely install the HS while the mobo is out of the case. Use gloves. And support the mobo well when you snap in the HS pins. You should also pay attention to how the locking pins align and make sure they're oriented correctly before pushing into the mobo. I had to redo the whole thing since the pins weren't oriented in the locking position the first time I tried installing. Other than that, things went pretty smooth. I ran Prime95 to torture test the setup and the CPU maxed out around 45C with only the case fans (I left the heat sink fan off).

Oh yeah, also make sure the standoffs in the case are correctly set for the mobo. I got sloppy and kept screwing up (either leaving in extra standoffs which could potentially cause a short or left out a standoff that didn't give the mobo much support when snapping in RAM).

I've received all my parts and will build this weekend.

P5N7A-VM
Antec Fusion Black 430 case
E7200
Ninja mini cpu cooler
OCZ 2x2GB PC6400 Ram
Seagate 1.5TB hard disk

I don't have a blu-ray drive yet and plan to use an old IDE dvd-rom. Will be using this mostly for playback of HD mkv and normal movie rips as well as light gaming, music etc.

Does this board work well with Vista 64? What I mean is are the beta chipset, graphics drivers etc all working with x64, or am I better off with 32 bit?

I'm running Vista x64 with 6Gb ram (had extra lying around so why not shove it into the HTPC ) and don't have any problems at all. No reboots, no lockups, no odd behavior, all drivers installed and worked as you'd expect. The only issue I have is tearing while playing DVD video. The issue is compounded when I use ffdshow to post-process the video. No matter what I've tried, I still get tearing. I'm going to re-install the OS from scratch today to see if that resolves the issue, but if not I'm thinking it's just a "feature" of the Nvidea chipset/graphics drivers. My 6600GT I had a few years ago did the same thing...ever since I switched to ATI I hadn't had tearing. Now that I'm back to Nvidia...I have tearing. very disheartening that it doesn't like me as I know others have perfect playback.

Well I completed my build last night (well kinda, since Im waiting for cybermonday for my new dvdrom burner and 1TB HD, until then i used a ide drive and a 150 gig hd, just to tests).

I installed the mb with a c2d 3.0 intel into a Antec mini 180.

Everything went fine. This is my second PC build so I was quite a bit nervous when working with the CPU and heatsink (using the stock one for now) for fear I was doing something wrong.

Everything booted just fine and installed ubuntu 8.10 with no problems. CPU is around 40 c and the mb is reporting around 50c within the nvidia settings but I havent done anything really with it yet (didnt even test sound). Just the install and since it was well past midnight last night, I had to call it quits.

Hi
I just put together my new HTPC system today - and it does NOT work very well. During installation of winXP the PC crashes - im thinking its the Chipset overheating (its extremely hot). Ive tried disconnecting everything from the motherboard, everything but the PS2-keyboard and the HDMI-out cable. Running the setup like this, the PC still crashes after a period of just looking at a bootscreen. Im using passive CPU cooling, so there is no airflow to the chipset cooler - but the motherboard is lying in open air (out of cabinet) and I think that a passive chipset-cooler should be able to cool the chipset without having to depend on other hardware to do the trick - if thats not the case, then ASUS has done a poor job with the cooling of this board.

Anyway - I think this board might be defective and im considering returning it for another one. What do u guys think? - will the next one be just as bad or is my current board defective in some way?

Another thing - could someone recoomend me a passive (or semi passive) cooler for the P5N7A-VM chipset, that is known to work well?