Slashdot Mirror

Lookup the SATA setting in BIOS. The A8V model has SATA settings that can be RAID or AHCI setting which will let OS to detect SATA drive as IDE drive.

ftp://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket939/A8V-M X/e2337_a8v-mx.pdf

Look at the 2-26 or page 68 where it shows you how to set the SATA mode as AHCI. This is the only work-around I've found so far.

http://www.intel.com/technology/serialata/ahci.htm
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

This should be suffice to gather enough info on the workaround. I had a bitching time setting up the SATA on mobo (although it wasn't A8V-MX but with same chipset and bios) until I found out my mobo accepts AHCI standard for SATA controller.

Currently, the biggest difference you can make comes from the CPU. Go with a P4, and you might as well abandon power consumption as a design constraint. On the opposite end of that spectrum, if you don't need a lot of horsepower, the Via Epia boards... For my "real" machines, I currently have Athlon64s... A Pentium-M would give more bang-per-watt, but they cost a hell of a lot more. And as I mentioned, the next-gen Core Duos look very promising.

Note that Core 2 Duo (Merom) is supposedly compatible with the current Core Duo chipset and socket. However, it might be worth waiting 2-3 months for the really good Core 2 Duo CPU/motherboards.

I haven't seen any reasonable-priced full-ATX motherboards announced for Core Duo. It seems like there should be more Core Duo desktop motherboards since Intel makes a desktop chipset specifically for low-power Core Duo desktops (945GT).

There should be dozens of 3rd tier Core motherboards out there by now for people to use to make their own PCs. Instead there is one, and it costs $300. Intel is not doing a great job indicating to the market which way they are headed.

I think Intel has purposely restricted their promotion of Core Duo for desktops. The only type of Core Duo desktops that I've seen promoted (by Intel) are pre-built, small, quiet ViiV desktops. Since Core Duo is designed to be a notebook processor (low TDP), maybe they think the best way to promote its desktop use is to show off how fast and quiet it can be in tiny computers.

If they wanted to promote it as an all-around desktop CPU, they could have easily made faster versions for bigger computers. However, Core Duo's current weaknesses (32-bit and average floating point performance) would be more exposed when compared to desktop processors. I think they're waiting for Conroe, with its EM64T and improved floating point, to make their big bang on the desktop.

That said, I don't understand why more motherboard manufacturers are not offering ViiV-oriented motherboards like Asus's. Intel has been offering a desktop chipset for Core Duo for a while now. AOpen does offer a Tivo-sized Core Duo "media center" barebones using that chipset, but it's not cheap (around $400 without CPU, hard drive, and memory). It looks fantastic for building a HTPC with no external parts, though.

You didn't mention if you're looking for AGP or PCI-e, but there are a handfull of passively cooled cards for both. Gigabyte has quite a selection, as does Asus. Or you could do what I did, which is buy a midlevel card and an aftermarket heat sink for it; my system isn't silent, but it's definitely very quiet.

There are definitely bigger and better CPU to lust after, even in terms of price/performance. But then, picking a decent motherboard for say a Dothan or Core Duo that is stable usually takes you to the enthusiast territory and the total system ends up costing much more than you intended. Athlon is an exception, of course.

Asus N4L-VH DH

• microATX form factor (one PCIe x16, one PCIe x1, two PCI)
• Socket 479 (Core Duo, Core Solo, Celeron M 4xx)
• Digital audio out with real-time Dolby Digital encoding
• External serial ATA port
• On-board TV-out (needs optional bracket to enable it)
• InterVideo WinDVD Suite OEM
• Bundled quiet CPU fan/heatsink
• Quick Resume support (instant on from deep sleep)

Personally, I'd rather wait for decent reasonably-priced Conroe motherboards. But this Asus motherboard does give me a reasonably-priced, cool, and quiet Core Duo (Merom-compatible) option.

Look, if you can't pony up for the dual-core Athlon, and the doubled up GeForce 7900, don't take it out on the game developers. Come on out of the stone age, why don'tcha.

I just have no tolerance for people that let their technology sit around for months without upgrading.

The first page of the review shows that the color count is 16.2M, this typically means that each channel is only 6 bits or 262,144 true colors dithered up to 16.2M. If you spend much time editing pictures, 6 bits per channel can drive you nuts. More details here On the positive side, Asus's website shows a 1 year ZBD (zero bright dot) warranty, and a 3 year panel warranty. link

ASUS and Gigabyte both make video cards with big heatsinks/heatpipes instead of fansinks. The fastest such card I'm aware of is the ASUS 7800GT TOP Silent

Unless you were actually going to run 4 graphics cards, there really wouldn't be much point, I mean who is actually going to use a x/16/8/8 or an 8/8/16/x configuration? Neither of these modes allow you to do SLi as slots 2 and 3 are at different speeds, so really you only options are 8/8/8/8 or 1/16/16/1.

All the other high-end boards run SLi at x16 anyway, but at that price point the rest of them are offering better sound (MSI Diamond) or perhaps better cooling solutions like this ASUS board.

Perhaps if you were running 4 PCI-E x1 cards it might be worth it, however if you're running SLi you already lose access to a PCI and a PCIEx1 slot anyway, leaving you with just three x1s. It'd be a smarter move to go for a boards that has say, two x1s, one x4 and a couple of normal PCI slots for backwards compatability (like on the ASUS linked above).

Also, a lot is sacrificed in flexability, for example, if you have a full length GTX card you lose access to IDE-1, and the poorly placed capacitors near the CPU means you'll have trouble installing large aftermarket HSFs, and if you're spending this much on your PC, then you definitely should NOT be using the Intel standard HSF. Those pesky capacitors also mean you have to hit the graphics card release with pliers if you have a beefy card, with there being scarce room for fingers between the card heatsink and the capacitors (Reference: AtomicMPC Issue 62).

A big plus to Gigabyte for Innovation, but it's not really a practicle solution.

PS: The board's been around to two months =S.

1. For safety reasons, always use the most updated BIOS utility!
2. Do not overclock the system/CPU during BIOS update!
3. Load "Setup Default" in BIOS menu before BIOS Update.
4. Make sure you have "Administator" privilege on your Windows system (WinNT4/2000/XP).
5. Close all application programs under Windows.
6. Disable any existing Anti-Virus applications in the system.
7. Reboot the PC after the BIOS update is complete.
8. Switch on the PC and load "Setup Default" in BIOS again.

In fact, Apple's new MacBook Pro marks the first time one of their machines has been assembled in China..

PC laptops just suck. PC makers operate on razor thin margins - which means cheap (and often proprietary) parts, gawd-awful, tech support, and an enormous number of models..

When I read the title I thought that this article would feature some nifty non-pc like designs. Wrong. They're just SFF PCs, some with a hide-away drive bay, except for possibly the last one which has some artistic curves.

    I've built two mythboxes now. The first is of the Shuttle G2 variety, which works nicely, but still looks very PC. The one I built for the girlfriend is a much prettier ASUS Pundit which is very aesthically pleasing. It's not "booksize" as advertised (unless you read books twice the thickness and length of a hardcover), but it's the smallest full-featured case I've found. Too bad the card reader isn't Linux supported and doesn't have all the card types available.

    What we really need is an article on very tiny (mini-itx preferably) motherboards and cases. I need something without fans, because most fans are distracting. The two I have are minimal, but if you strain it can definetly be heard. The Via chipset looks promising, and the almost fanless 1Ghz Epia Nehemiah motherboard might fit the bill, but I'm not sure how well supported the architecture is supported in Linux.

    In researching my post here, I stumbled across Shuttle's latest M1000 offering. That looks pretty sweet, but I haven't done my due dilligence on Linux compatibility yet.

    So, if someone could review the prettiest, smallest, fanless (and throw in cheapest too) HTPC case/motherboard combos, it would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Till then, I'll browse http://www.mini-itx.com/ from time to time.

Why not a Mac Mini? Otherwise an Athlon 64 system can be made to run very cool and quietly. The Asus A8N CSM has good onboard graphics with DVI-out. The main problem that I found in the x86 world is that small, good looking cases are very overpriced, which is why I went with the Mac. OTOH it's much easier to get good inexpensive tuners (like the Hauppauge PVR or ATI Theater 550). On the Mac you seem to be stuck with the pricey El-Gato stuff.

Although Linksys was the beginning of running non-standard flash on off-the-shelf wireless routers, it is far from the pinnacle.

My money's on the Asus WL-500G Deluxe Why? because although it does not have 8 megs of flash, it has USB ports. Two of them, if I'm not mistaken. With the OpenWRT project, you can actually include the USB mass storage driver and plug a flash device (or a USB hard drive, I suppose) into this thing and have just about all the storage space you could want.

Of course, you can do this with NFS on other routers, but that requires that the network is up and that the other machine is up. This is a simpler, safer solution, particularly if you want access to the filesystem immediately after bootup.

I use an ASUS WL-HDD 2.5 for these kind of things.

http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=12&l2=44&l3=0 &model=460&modelmenu=1

It's a pocket-harddrive sized file-server with WIFI and Ethernet. The server side is often handy.

It's probably not as small as you may be looking for, but it is pocket sized (a little larger than a 2.5" HDD) and runs embedded Linux and SMB, with file shares, which makes it quite a useful took to carry around.

It wouldn't take much to convert it to battery operation,

GrpA.

The ASUS PM17TU Monitor will also offer 3ms response time. More specifically this is gray to gray (Just like the Viewsonic). But the I don't think the viewsonic nor the ASUS is anything "revolutionary". Besides the contrast ratio's aren't that good... The Asus is 600:1 and the Viewsonic is 550:1 There are more important things than just response time. I do though like thier zero dead pixel policy, I'm glad to see more manufacturers offering this as a standard.

If you can point me to a PC manufacturer that makes well designed and high quality products like Apple does than I'd be very much obliged.

ASUSTeKshipped more than one million notebooks to Apple, the paper indicated. According to sources, the company produced Apple's 12.1-inch iBook and 12.1-inch PowerBook. ASUSTeK also secured orders for the 15.4-inch iBook, which will be launched in 2006, the sources added.

I've been using this board from Asus for about 6 months with onboard SATA RAID5. It cost $120 from Newegg.com when I got it, if my memory serves me.

I have no idea if this help or not, but NVidia has a technology called ActiveArmor that may be of interest. In a nutshell, it's a Gigabit hardware firewall solution that is built into many inexpesive boards. Supposedly it can be used in both incoming and outgoing directions, allowing you to know immediately if a penetrator attempts to access improper network resources. Here's the schpiel:

ActiveArmor Firewall supports stateless and stateful inspection, Web-based management, pre-defined security profiles, port block filtering, remote administration, and provides an easy-to-use set-up wizard. In addition, ActiveArmor Firewall has anti-hacking features such as anti-IP-spoofing, anti-sniffing, anti-ARP-cache-poisoning, and anti-DHCP server-important security controls for corporate network environments. In a corporate setting, an end-point firewall (such as a desktop firewall) with anti-hacking capabilities can reduce the internally originated security breaches, and can inhibit desktops from generating unauthorized traffic. The result is improved overall security, with reduced requirements from the IT staff.

Again, I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for, but it's at least a very interesting product.

The firmware source which you can download, unfortunately, either comes without the wireless drivers or with binary wireless drives compiled only for the embedded processor which sits in the boards. Which leads us back to square one.

Thus, since Broadcom obviously already have working Linux drivers, it would be a simple matter for them to release them. However, being a company with a bad (but recently improved) history of cooperating with the OSS community, our only option is to support and buy products from those who do it well.

While large manufacturers build machines on exclusive designs from resellers like Dell, IBM, HP, Sony, etc., many of these same manufacturers have thier own branded designs available through smaller resellers.

These manufacturer designs are cheaper because they are often sold unbranded. They also experience shorter timespans between hardware revisions because they don't have to wait for those exclusive design specs from resellers, and thus often have the latest components in their models months ahead of those from the major resellers.

ASUS, one of the largest manufacturers in Asia, supplies Apple with Powerbooks, iPod shuffle & minis, Sony with many of their laptops, and have been an on-and-off builder for IBM in the past (there was a report in March of ASUS in major talks with Lenovo to be their supplier in the future), among other famous names. This is one of the many well-kept secrets in the laptop industry.

ASUS has seen their own laptop line more than double in sales since last year, mainly due to word of mouth between computer enthusiasts venturing into the laptop market.

Major manufacturers who supply brand name resellers as well as popular specialty shops:

ASUS
Mitac
Uniwill
Clevo
Compal

Some resellers (VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest, Hypersonic, ABS, and Alienware among others) add some paint and a label (and, like good captalists, at least $500 to the pricetag) to these machines to come up with their own specialty models. Many other less visible resellers (MWave, Discountlaptops, ISTNC, Proportable, and others) sell the exact same machines unbranded in customizable barebone configurations for incredibly low prices.

As computer enthusiasts ditch their unwieldy desktops for portable solutions, we will find manufacturer brands becoming more and more visible to the general public, and large brands will have even more competition.

You're full of it. No 5-year old PC motherboard can possibly support an AGP 4x or higher graphics card. Might as well chuck out that whole PC if you want a new graphics card.
not that i support the grandparent poster, id just like to make you realise youre a moron too

A7V, note the agp 4x support
a review, note the date. now this wasnt the first mobo to support agp 4x, not by a long shot. only reason i use it as an example is i owned one so i knew you were wrong.

so anyhow, what was that about no 5 year old mobo supporting agp 4x?

Fantastic! I just bought a new system at lunch today and now Slashdot has an article about CPUs :(

If anyone cares, here's what I picked up:

• AMD Athlon 64 2800+ CPU
• ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard
• Corsair CMX1024-3200 RAM module
• Maxtor 250G SATA Ultra 16, 7200 RPM harddisk
• CoolerMaster Centurion case

The system will be running OpenBSD 3.7.

Assuming I don't fry the mobo, bend pins on the CPU or squirt thermal compound all over the place, I should be good to go. Just to be sure, I'm going to pet my cats for luck :)

You can sli regular 6800's: http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/en6800/overview.h tm

No, but I think there are very few of us. I think most of the people who want ECC RAM for their desktop PCs want it for their "workstations," not "mainstream desktops." Heck, even some "workstations" don't support ECC RAM.

I kit out all my new machines with at least 1GB RAM and I want long uptimes on all my Windows, Linux and FreeBSD machines. I really want ECC RAM, but it seems that only Intel's server chipsets support it.

Not only Intel's server chipsets. Intel's 955X chipset supports ECC RAM and it's a "performance desktop/workstation" chipset. Unfortunately, 955X motherboards seem to carry about a $100 price premium over their "mainstream" counterparts. The ASUS P5WD2 Premium supports ECC RAM and costs $230 at Chiefvalue (Newegg's sister site). You can even put a lowly Celeron D in it.

That thing is clunky! For a little bit more, I'd rather get one of these and put in one of these. It would be thinner, have 6gb (removable, too), a more powerful processor, and a VGA screen.

I'm happy today. See, I picked up an Asus GeForce Extreme N5900... for ~$20. Sure, nothing special, but it's a nice price so good backup-card. Got a handy CD/DVD-case and "Deus Ex 2" with that too.

I love when web stores suffer data entry errors...

I built a MythTV box using an Asus Pundit.
http://www.asus.com/products/desktop/pundit/overvi ew.htm
The Pundit is a small form factor all in one that looks a lot like any other home theatre component when turned on its side and is quiet too. While it can be a nuisance to set up MythTV, once it is working, it will continue to work well. You just have to make sure all your hardware is linux compatible and works together well.

There are a lot of nice things you can do with it. Watching any movies or music is simple as they can just be transferred over via a wireless network. SAMBA can be used to share stuff. Emulators for lots of different systems can be used. You also don't have to pay for any service like you do with TiVo or the other companies. Of course, it will record TV as well.

The main complaints I saw were it would be noisy, unable to record more than one channel at once, ugly form factor, bad UI, and bad tv listings. The pundit isn't noisy or ugly. MythTV will record more than one show at a time, you just need another tuner. MythTV also has a very nice UI, MUCH better than the regular cable DVRs I have seen. Listings come from Zap2It and are very reliable.

I think the notion is that you just build a DVR out of the scrap that is in your closet. If you do that, sure, it will be ugly and loud. But if you spend a little more for a pundit or similar system it will work out very well.

A big problem is HD recording though. I will be getting a DVR from my cable company to record HD now because getting HD recording to work with Myth looks scary and expensive. So if anyone wants to buy a slighty used MythTV box, email me at QwQw at earthlink doot net!

A year or two ago, I read, here somewheres, that ALL drivers had to be 64-bit, if one switched. . .

IF that is true, and one has to get drivers for a bunch of strange stuff for one's AMD64 notebook ( dig the screen-space & capability on this barebones Asus 'book ), and such aren't going to be all available, then it makes sense to go with SUSE AMD64 & Win-32, doesn't it?

I don't want to buy 2 copies of WinXP just because the first one won't really work. . .

Specifically, I'm thinking of 3rd-party drivers. . .

If the article is correct, Intel could build in a coffee pot for those long nights of full load modeling.

Ah, this would explain why Asus released a barebones solution called S-presso. Just add a couple of dual cores, water cooling, a fine italian pump, and poof the next generation in computers the e-s-presso. As the water travels over one each dual core chip it's super heated quickly and the italian pump takes over. Through the grounds to your demitasse mugs.

Warning, not drinking enough espresso may result in premature burn out.

The ASUS K8N-DL is a dual Opteron motherboard which officially supports up to 24GB RAM in 6 DIMMs. It costs only about $300, too. Not sure of current availability, it's pretty new.

If I was on the market now I'd probably buy an Asus WL-500g. Its basically the same hardware as a Linksys WRT54G, also running Linux which you are also able to add a custom firmware if you are so inclined. The Asus has a couple big advantages, namely:

- its expandable through a USB port. You can plug in disks, usb speakers, a printer

- the factory firmware is very smart. It includes support for the above mentioned expandability, ftp, samba, traffic shaping

personally?

i'de get this board, not worry about the SLI features (unless your gonna use it) and not care about the hardware RAID... this way if you get really paranoid you can stick 4 more drives in and mirror the bitches! or alturnativly stick in more drives to make it go faster!

but thats just what i'de do. if it was just for me servin files to myself & friends. anything more i'de start to look into more $$$

You can replace the mobo, case+ps, and video card with a slick-looking ASUS Pundit for the same price.

I don't think that's true. For example, ASUS makes a Centrino Laptop with ATI integrated graphics.

There's plenty to learn if you want to use windows.

You need to constantly upgrade IE, avoid malicious sites, learn which activeX warnings to click 'no' on, install anti-virus software, lock down your mail client, or learn to "view source" before clicking links in email, figure out which office features are correctly supported by newer/older versions of office, etc, etc.

Most people that ask me windows questions are having trouble with security or hardware trouble. I have similar problems with hardware under the two OS'es. (I only buy stuff that's supported under Linux.) As for security, there's no comparison.

Most of the people I work with (all Computer Science grad students, in other words, expert users) that run Windows XP have had their systems infected with viruses / spyware at least once over the last two years. I don't know anyone that's had this happen under Linux over that time period, and I know more Linux users than Windows users.

Why? It's simple. Linux software tends to be relatively secure by default, both in user interface terms, and in terms of underlying technology (for example, there is no activeX, and most software comes from a centralized, audited repository). Also, since Linux has a smaller user base, it is less of a target for phishing attacks, browser hijacks, worms, etc.

Besides, I "just turn on the machine and surf the web" once I have the OS installed, and last I checked, the infamous Debian installer worked much better in a dual-boot environment than the XP one.

(XP moves the equivalent of fdisk /mbr to the install disk, and the install disk hangs on boot if the partition table has been edited by debian. Also, XP refuses to leave some space at the beginning of the hard drive, preventing you from placing linux's boot partition in front of the @#$%! 8.4G bios limitiation that apparently still applies on some new computers. So much for assuming 'I'll have Linux create a boot partition 50Gig into the disk and install grub, I can just restore the MBR if necessary...')

Is it just me, or dose the 'beamer' box look exactly like an ASUS pundit case?

Asus Pundit

Still, looks like a nice box.

--
Does MSN censor search results?

...when you buy crappy kit. Next time do it right.

according to this story on digitimes the shuffles are made by asustek. however, the same story says that g5 ibooks and powerbooks are coming in the second quarter, so take with a grain of salt...

You can get TV-tuners as USB-dongles, I've seen it, but never tried it. Here's a Googled link: http://shopping.zdnet.co.uk/shopping/video-cards/t v-tuner-cards/0,20000296,20283447p,00.htm

Or you could go for the Asus W1000Na-series of notebooks: http://uk.asus.com/products/notebook/w1series/w100 0na/w1000na_overview.htm

It comes with built-in TV-tuner and remote-control, even sporting a small subwoofer. But according to the forum for W1000N Asus refuses to give out the standards, so it's proprietary and the software really sucks.

But aside from that the W1000N-series is really highly regarded by its owners, as you can read on the fan forum-site: http://www.w1n-forum.net/

It even sports 4.1 sound output, which is good enough if you're not a fanatic.

I'm waiting for Dolby Surround 6.1, and upgraded options on this baby. But if I really have to buy a laptop, I would buy it today. Just make sure you get the a-series for the TV-tuner. It might even be the better option if tomorrows laptops gets hotter and noisier as they get upgraded.

Already done. Ralink already offer Linux drivers for their 802.11 chipsets from their official website. The last time I looked, these used the nVidia/ATI-style 'closed binary blob plus glue code' approach for their drivers, but that doesn't seem to be the case any longer.

ASUS are even declaring official 'Linux support' on the boxes of their Ralink-based cards. I don't know how good the drivers are yet, let alone the hardware, but at a current retail price of 17GBP in the UK, I might give one a punt shortly.

Or is that MoviX^2?

Perhaps also run it on this ASUS motherboard and casing combo.

Should be a snap.

I think, like a lot of ppl here, that the s-presso is quite ugly.

I don't undestand why there's an article about that piece of crap instead of digimatrix also from ASUS.

The vcr look isn't all that original but fits a lot better into your average home tv/vcr place. And pay attention to the dimension: it's quite small.

my .02 euro

According to Nintendo, the GameCube is 4.3 inches tall. According to Asus, this thing is 7.1 inches. That's freaking huge for an AV component, unless you're talking about a receiver, which this thing is not. So you're half right: it's like a gamecube blown up to x-box proportions.

http://usa.asus.com/products/desktop/digimatrix/ov erview.htm#

Well, you made me stop and think long enough to do the math.

With 12.5 % of a population of 295,000,000 at the poverty level, or 36,875,000. Following the previous poster's chart of $250 billion donated, that means that each person at the poverty level in the United States could receive $6779.66. (No links, you can do your own math.) I'd say giving each impoverished American a newer used Volvo is pretty generous. Of course, if it was donated more wisely instead of more freely, it might actually get where it is needed.

Also, if you'd care to check around on your 'American' spirit you leftist commie pinko America hating Michael Moore wannabe moron, on such sites as The World Food Programme, you might see that America normally gives more to humanitarian causes than the rest of the world combined.

If you wanted to start a "save the world" thread on slashdot, it would have probably been more beneficial and more 'interesting' to suggest we all visit thehungersite.com.

I'd also be more inclined to suggest that the author possibly donate his old PC to the local library after he upgrades or something that seems maybe a little less forceful than "screw your wants and needs, give your hard earned money away".

Btw, to the author, since you seem to be interested in SFF, the Asus S-presso has a nice look to me.

I've been looking for stylish cases as well. I ran across the Asus Espresso and thought it looked pretty sexy with a touch sensitive LCD display. I am probably going to get it to be my new mythTV box. http://usa.asus.com/products/desktop/s-presso/over view.htm