• specification of the board: see ASUS home page

soft factors

• it looks really nice with the passive cooling stuff
• it is really good managing the noise level depending on the CPU load (good for living rooms and MythTV boxes)

installation

• installed Ubuntu 7.06 on
  • 2 hard drives with a Linux SW RAID1 root partition to keep it fast and secure against failure, and another RAID0 partition with huge space for the movies we record using MythTV
  • AMD 64x2 processor
  • 2GB RAM
  • 'old' analog TV card
  • 2 graphic cards (Nvidia, cheepest I could find) to support
    • 1 projector for MythTV viewing
    • 1-2 screens for desktop work
• then upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10

performance

• when coming from an AMD64 machine from shelf (HP), this is a real runner
• the 2 cores of the AMD64x2 make the system really nice to handle, you nearly never wait for anything
• the harddrives are much faster than in my old board (HP destop PC for home use)

• MythTV consumes 10-15% CPU load => plenty of room for work on the desktop screen while rest of the family watches TV

problems

• AUDIO:
  • the HD audio chipset gives problems
  • It seems like it is not fully supported by the kernel
  • I need to connect the TV card to the microphone input of the board, because I cannot get good audio levels with the on-board connector for CD audio
  • it is simply not possible to listen to an audio input source other than PCM.

  • this is no problem with MythTV, as this setup always first records from an input and plays sound via PCM => works

  • this is no problem for playing MP3, ogg, radio, etc. because all of these use PCM
  • this is no problem for wathching DVDs or internet video clips/shows/TV because the movie players use PCM
  • this is a problem if you want to do pre-listening to your recordings
  • this is a problem if you want to use a standard TV application to watch TV with your TV card: then you need to connect your loudspeakers/amplifier directly to the TV card instead of the mixer output of the motherboard.
  • however, the board produces low-noise fine sound when playing PCM

Overall

• this is the best desktop Linux setup i ever run
• the price of the board is really ok for the quality and performance you get (even w/o overclocking)
• i feel that the HD controller is really faster than the normal controllers used by cheaper chipsets
• i do not test it with games, etc., mostly with desktop and multimedia applications