*Official* Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H Thread (NVIDIA 9400 mATX HDMI 8 channel LPCM) - Page 9

The HDMI audio driver is found by selecting

nForce > nForce 7 Series > nForce 730i/GeForce 9400/9300 mGPU > HDMI Audio Driver

a bit tricky, but should not be hard to find. Yep, this driver should be definitely included in the "Driver" itself.

Exactly... you should always be able to go to the Motherboard manufacturers web page and get all the drivers you need...

For information, in technical magazine, there is a comparative test of GF9300 / 9400 MB. Their recommended choice is Asus P5N7A-VM even if Gigabyte is more powerfull. Their argument is that even if 9400 is much more powerfull than 9300 in 3D application, it's not powerful enough to play games correctly so it's useless to spend so much money. It's not my point of view, I prefer to have a beter frame rate even if these boards are more expensive since I don't change my PC so often, I prefer to put a little more money...
My hesitations were more caused by mini ITX boards now : some boards like J&W MINIX 780G boards are small and powerful enough to be used as HTPC, web station and general purpose machine. The only bad point : a lot of pieces exists but a few of them are really available. And it's expensive actually but I think ITX will replace micro-ATXvery soon ... (sorry for this little out of thread )

the problem with the Asus board is that Asus doesn't correctly read Memory SPD settings...

Really ? Anyway I think it's just a bug that will be fixed by the next BIOS release ...

Sorry to bother you all again, but I have received no answer regarding DXVA, really nobody used DXVA (DirectX Video Accelerations aka HW acceleration) with this board?

hi, does somebody use this board with all
5 or 6 SATA-ports used ? and if so how strong
is your powersuplly ?

In my HTPC i use a Intel E7300, 2048 RAM Kit CL4,
6 SATA harddrives and 1 SATA Blu-raydrive. Two
SATA harddrives are connected to a PCI RAID expansioncard
from Promise Technologies ( SATA300 TX2plus ).

And i use a 400 watt ( peak 460 watt ) powersupply. Nearly
every time i startup my system i get a mainbios checksum error.
I changed my RAM, nothing changed. I changed my mainboard
batterie, no changes. I contacted Gigabyte and they told me,
maybe the bios is damaged and has to be replaced.

So i did a last test and only connected 1 SATA harddrive and
for 5 times i had no mainbios checksum errors ?! so at the moment
i am not shure if it is really my powersuplly not strong anoth to
handle all drives ???

I littlebit strange because in my old system Gigabyte 965p mainboard,
with 8 SATA drives onboard, a E6300 i had no issues ...

Could somebody imagine that it is the powersuplly ??? please give me a
hint, because i don't wanna send the mainboard to the service and get
the information no problems found .... Thanks

Installed this and was only seeing 3 of 5 drives in IDE mode, so tried it in AHCI mode and Windows can't load. Having read this thread, I see I now need to go back to IDE settings, then do this to get my boot device working in AHCI.

Only problem is, I hadn't read that before I started tinkering and I tried switching the setting to RAID. Now, when I try and boot I just get stuck on a screen which says

MediaShield ROM BIOS 10.0.0.35 RPT IDP
Detecting storage devices...

The cursor has been blinking now for nearly half an hour. The real problem is that you can't get into the BIOS until drive detection is done, so I can't switch the setting back. Should it really be taking this long, even on first run with 4 hard drives?

Alternatively, is there any way to force it to go to the BIOS before drive detection, or to restore the original BIOS settings from a USB stick?

Sata ports #3 and #4 only support AHCI/Raid mode. Do you have it setup that way. That might be giving you the checksum error if not.

Hello all. As of today I'm in desperate need of a new HTPC and was following this MB thread till page three weeks ago. Now my pc is acting up and there's no waiting. I'm hoping I can get some quick suggestions from those of you here that have stable systems that will fit my needs as follows.

1) I need a very quiet pc. At present the small fans on my p4 chip and video card combined with the power supply, exhaust fan and HD make my 4 year old 720p pc very noisy.

2) I want to be able to play any 1080p 24 content either from BR, BR rips, MKV etc and listen to DTSMA or DDTHD over HDMI while downloading at 1.5mb and uploading at 150kbps. That would be my heaviest load on the pc. I don't plan on using the pc for gaming.

3)Want to run Vista Ultimate 32. At present I use XP.

4) I won't be burning anything. I have 4 external HD for a total of 5TB. Although I might want 2 internals as I only use one at present and this worries me when things like this go wrong and I have media and OS on the same drive.

5) I'm not too concerned with case size but want to switch to a horizontal layout to match my Denon 4308 AVR. So something solid black without bright LCD displays would do fine as I use an Optima HD71 DLP projector and all my equipment faces the screen.

6) I will not be building this myself. I'll be giving the list to a shop and having them do that as I've never put a pc together and have only basic knowledge of internals.

So I think that's it. Thanks everyone.

Fixed it - just disconnected power from all my drives and it got past that screen in seconds.

Now one other issue - I have a CPU fan and 2 chassis fans in my Silverstone LC17, but there's only 1 on-board chassis fan power header. If I need both running, what should I do?

Get a Y-cable to connect both to the fan header.

@ DJWikiera,
yes my system is setup like this. Sometimes, especially if i got into
the bios and did a Qflash or something like that my system starts
like it should. But mostly out of 20 times maybe 19 times i only get
the checksum error.

Do you think it could be the powersupply ? how much does a SATA
harddrive take from the powersupply ?

Sorry, what was your exact question? I think pretty much everyone is using DXVA... I'm using DXVA when playing back bluray ripped MKV's from inside Vista Media Center... is that what you're asking about?

EDIT: Ok, so I went back and read your post... you're asking about MPC in XP... not sure I can give you much help there. I don't have MPC installed on the new build yet, but if I did, I'm sure it would be using DXVA also... what it boils down to is having a video decoder filter that has support for DXVA.

I have Arcsoft TMT installed and that's the filters I'm using. It took me forever to figure out how to get those to work outside of TMT, but I finally got it to work. They showed up in Radlight Filter Manager, but no matter what I set the priority to, nothing outside of TMT would use them (both audio and video filters). Turns out that I just needed to copy some .DLL's from the Arcsoft folder to the System32 folder. After that I just cranked up the priority in Radlight and now I can playback 1080p MKV's from windows media player (inside of VMC) only using a couple % of CPU power.

Bottom line is you need to get some codec's which support hardware acceleration.

I need one as well. Is this the sort of thing?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812189062

That would be fine if your fans have 4 pin connector, you'd hook to power supply.

In order to hook to motherboard you would need this cable, if your fans have three pin connector.

Thank you for Arcsoft TMT advice and I know I need DXVA complaint codecs. But to be able to use DXVA your OS and GPU have to support it. You can check it using utility DXVA Checker. And the problem is that even I have GF 9400 motherboard, DXVA Checker shows no HW support at all. I have XP wit SP3, DirectX 9.0c and the latest drivers but not result in DVXA checker and it should look like this:

So what does your DXVA Checker show?

Has anyone else experienced stuttering audio on playback over SPDIF? I get a short stutter every 30-60 seconds that last about one second then it plays just fine for another 30-60 seconds. I've installed the latest audio driver off of the Gigabyte website and it still does the same thing. Running Vista Ultimate 64.

Has anyone been able to use the Xpress Recovery2 program with Vista 62 bit? I have one 250GB main drive, an LG SATA drive and three 1GB drives in a RAID 5 array from the MB.

I can't seem to get some sort of error about it not seeing a IDE drive. I've forgotten the exact wording. I treid turning the IDE setting on and off and still won't let me go in and load this program during boot up. Is there some way I can use this program?

Hello.

I have two 19" LCD monitors [1280x1024] with DVI inputs. Has anyone used an HDMI->DVI adapter and the on-board DVI port to drive two monitors at 1280x1024@60Hz at the same time?

This board looks perfect for a slim/quiet desktop PC, but I need dual DVI and none of the documentation explicitly states whether you can use both digital outputs at the same time.

I read on NewEgg that some folks had trouble using HDMI+DVI on the Asus 9300-based boards, but nothing about the Gigabyte 9400 boards.


BTW, if I get this board I'll run Windows 7 BETA on it

Did you install XR2 after setting up OS?

Crap! I set up the unallocated partition but didn't actually run it then. The manual seems to read that I should install the operating system first and then add the unallocated partition and then go back and run XR2 from the Gigabyte disk to set it up. I didn't realize that I couldn't go ahead and load the programs. Am I not able to run the set up now?

If you made the partition and not XR2, I doubt that it recognizes the partition. XR2 automatically creates the partition the first time it's run. You have to leave unallocated space and not a partiton.

Startup: < 30W per drive
Read/Write: < 10W per drive.

400W should be enough for six drives.

My reciever Denon 2307 supports 192 (and 88, 176) khz (Moninfo reports: CE audio data (formats supported) LPCM 8-channel, 16/20/24 bit depths at 32/44/48/88/96 kHz, LPCM 2-channel, 16/20/24 bit depths at 32/44/48/88/96/176/192 kHz),

but Nvidia driver "Properties>Supported Format > Sample Rates" does not have this option (I see only 32,44,48,96 kHz)

What is wrong?

When I run DXVA Checker it show no DXVA abilities - empty screen:


I'm curios if anybody else experieneced the same problem. Do I need to install Vista or at least reinstall XP?

i am also interested in this, but i don't have this board yet. maybe the drivers for xp don't have dxva, perhaps you need vista instead. would probably help a lot of people if you could verify this theory.

Quote from MB's homepage:

This is what you get under Vista...