M3N78-VM
Specifications
- AMD® AM2+ Quad-Core CPU/AM2 CPU Support
- NVIDIA GeForce 8200 Chipset
- Hybrid SLI Support
- HyperTransport 3.0 and PCIe 2.0 Ready
- HDMI/Full HD Support
- Smooth Blu-ray / HD DVD Playback
- Multi Displays Support
- DX10 Support
- Instant Internet Access with Express Gate™
- Support 45nm Phenom™ II CPU
Notes
The manual and Asus website indicate that this board only has a video memory limit of 256mb. As of the 0907 bios (?), you can tell the bios to give 512mb to the video. This is not documented anywhere, but has been verified. Note that this deducts 512mb from your system memory as it is shared.
The bios will default to the cpu fan speed not being controlled (runs max). Turning on the fan speed controls in the bios greatly reduces the noise of the cpu fan.
HDMI
I saw a post indicating on a different M3N78-xx board that the person had to set a jumper to switch from the DVI to the HDMI. This does not seem to be the case with M3N78-VM -- it auto-switches to whichever port has something plugged into it.
Overscan - If the MythTV GUI isn't all fitting on your screen, you may need to tweak the display settings.
HDMI Audio
The M3N78-VM requires Alsa 1.0.19 for audio over HDMI to work correctly. For Mythbuntu, there is a script that will automatically download required source, make the package, and install it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6589810
See this link for info on /etc/asound.conf changes, un-muting the hdmi audio using alsamixer, etc. Config
ACPI Wakeup
Manual wakeup tests seem to work. Trying to get automated shutdown to work.
VDPAU
This nvidia chipset is supported for vdpau. VDPAU support However, using this mode requires a tweak to force the OS to keep the cpu freq running high enough to support it. CPU Freq discussion In other words, the GPU is doing all the work so the OS thinks the CPU isn't busy and thus throttles everything down including the GPU which causes video playback to skip, stutter, etc.
I had luck using the cpufeqd package, editing /etc/cpufeqd.conf and uncommending the ondemand profile and modifying the minfreq setting. However, it still seemed to not be as high of a quality as not using vdpau and letting the cpu handle it. Weird.
