On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 10:57:29 -0700 "skeeterskip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've been playing around with different motherboards. The via EPIA
> motherboard I have doesn't seem to have good video drivers, and is
> expensive, so I'm thinking of switching to Microatx and using Celeron
> or Duron CPU.
>
> MB I'm looking at is Asus A7N8X-VM This board has integrated LAN/Audio
> and Geforce 4 integrated. It is also supposed to have tvencoder, but
> board doesn't seem to come with AV out for it. I'm wondering if anyone
> knows of some other boards.
I've been very pleased with my Biostar M7VIG-Pro. It cost me about $60
after shipping from newegg. it's a microatx socket-A board with built in
kitchen sink, on-board digital audio works well with an $8 add-on
dongle. Includes an AGP slot for your Matrox G400-DH card (onboard video
has no tv-out). Onboard ethernet depends on the sub-version of the model
you get -- some have Realtek ethernet, some have VIA ethernet that
requires the 'rhinefet' driver to be compiled outside of the kernel, at
least as of 2.4.20 it did. My version has the VIA ethernet and it works
very well.
There is a tiny issue where digital audio is only supported by the ALSA
driver for the VIA audio, and the ALSA driver only supports 48khz. Older
VIA chipsets only supported 48khz, the maintainer of the OSS driver for
the same chips states that he's added variable sample rate support to
the OSS driver, which doesn't support digital output. I can't say for
sure if the way the biostar board is configured supports variable sample
rates - i would probably have to dig up a datasheet for the codec chip
they used. mplayer does a good job of resampling the audio if you tell
it to. I haven't had occasion to try hwac3, although my receiver
supports it.
I think it's been superseded by the M7VIG-D or somesuch, which may come
with the digital audio output dongle.
The biostar manual is a single postcard-sized chunk of stiff paper, but
it was entirely sufficient.
- Eric
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