ASUS E45M1-M PRO AMD E-450 APU AMD Hudson M1 Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo

Pros: Small, Low power/ low heat, attractive

Cons: Quirky BIOS, unstable operation, poor memory compatibility

Other Thoughts: This is my second board. Board 1 was DOA out of the box. Newegg replaced it with another. I have just coaxed windows 7 premium on it and got everything up to date. On every reboot during the update process, the BIOS would crash and I couldn't get the board to post until pushing reset several times, rapidly. It never really boots up properly. Makes me dread shutting it down. Once it's running, it works fine while you use it but when it sleeps, it crashes or freezes. Asus is normally my "go to" brand for little builds like this. I am very disappointed in the instability.
One other thing, it's finicky about memory. I haven't found any it will take 8 GB of. It will only run with 4 GB of memory so far. I have some other options to try as far as brands later. If I have new data on that front, I will update my review if I can.
I may try to flash the BIOS if this continues. Heed this warning: This motherboard is trouble. Choose something else.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

What version os did you install 32 bit or 64 bit? Have you tried removing everything and just the minimum system requirements.

What memory are you trying to use that is failing? What is your PSU wattage?

Have you tried disabling the turbo key switch?

Have you tried reinstalling the OS?

Have you tried changing the mode of your hard drive from AHCI to IDE or vice versa.

Here is a link below where you can update to the latest drivers and bios.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/E45M1M_PRO/#support

If you have any questions or comments you can email me again at cl-jeffrey@asus.com which I reside in the U.S

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey

Pros: It plays 1080P no problem, streams it as well, power usage is minimal. Perfect for HTPC except.....

Cons: Everything works great except for sleep. Note you need to update bios in order to not get BOS when waking up but after that. I still get problems from waking from sleep. When I put it to sleep and wait 10-15 minutes to wake up no problems. But If I put it to sleep and wait over an hour or two the thing wont wake up. Ive tried WOL, waking up from keyboard, waking up from power button and nothing. If someone has found out how to do this it would be great if you posted something here. Its not a deal breaker but I wish these feature would work.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your feedback. The sleep issue may be a OS configuration issue. Please make sure you have the latest chipset drivers installed, and turn off Hybrid Sleep in Power Options. Check if the system is set to enter Hibernate state after a long period of time or disable Hibernate and retest. Open a command prompt and type "powercfg -devicequery wake_armed" to see a list of devices that can wake the system from sleep. If none are shown, go to Device Manager and right click on the device to allow waking the system--uncheck "Allow this device to wake the computer". Refer to Sevenforums.com's guide "Windows 7 - Devices - See Devices that are able to Wake Up the Computer" at http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/122019-devices-see-devices-able-wake-up-computer.html for more information. For additional support, please contact me at cl-benson@asus.com and I'll try my best to assist you. Thank you.

For support information, please visit http://support.asus.com. For service, visit http://service.asus.com. For motherboard warranty, visit http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!Motherboard%20Warranty/c1c20; Refurbished: http://www.service.asus.com/warranty.aspx#!refurbished-warranty/c16us. For RMA status, visit: http://am.eservice.asus.com/rmaweb/search/rmCustomerQueryAction.do?.

Regards,
Benson
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: 2 PCI slots on a modern motherboard
(Also a con, see below.)

Cons: I want to re-iterate comment by Wayne S. I only wish I had seen his comment before I purchased this.

This board uses a faulty ASM1083 PCI bridge chipset.
If you plan on using any of the integrated PCI devices or the 2 PCI slots then you are sure to see severely poor performance as IRQs only work in polled mode.

In the worst case you could even encounter crashes or data corruption. (I am seeing that I very often lose coherency on the RAID-drives I am running behind these PCI slots and I have to rebuild the raid set every couple of days.)

Other Thoughts: Probably going to see if I can return this to ASUS for a refund, but not holding out much hope...

Pros: Small form factor, noiseless, processor will run fine without the optional included fan. Only consumes about 45 - 65 watts while running.

Cons: 90% of the time this motherboard will not come out of sleep mode - either by keyboard command or by pressing the power button. In fact, once it is in sleep mode, if it won't come out of sleep mode, it won't power off either after pressing the power button for the requisite 6 seconds.

Other Thoughts: I have this setup as part of a home theater PC and was really dissappointed that I could not keep it in sleep mode so I can record shows at any time (my software will wake it up).

Pros: Inexpensive board.

Cons: Thought it would be a money saver not to have to buy a separate graphics card. Was I ever wrong. Graphics performace is very poor. Got very low frame rates (2-4 FPS).
Ended up installing separate GPU to get decent graphics performance.

Pros: This motherboard works great, even for playing HD video.

Cons: The darnest thing is that the ASUS motherboard destroys keyboards and mice. To date, I have lost 2 keyboards and 3 mice. That's pretty expensive. So if you buy this motherboard, then budget in an extra $500 a year for new keyboards and mice.

Other Thoughts: I logged on to the ASUS web site and spent half an hour looking for warranty service. All they have on there is FAQ and general info. So after half an hour, I found a little message saying that you have to log onto service.asus.com for the warranty. Apparently they can't provide a link for that on the main site, because then everybody would be returning defective motherboards, and the ASUS mailbox would be swamped.

I logged on to the ASUS service web site and got a blank, white screen. Nothing. I guess ASUS doesn't want anybody using that warranty. Well, I can share my story with others on here at least.

Pros: 5 Sata Ports in a small, low power form factor. Clean bios with easy options for power saving, performance and balanced.

Cons: Only problem is the onboard NIC isn't supported in FreeNas 8.

Other Thoughts: I looked at the SuperMicro boards and saw a lot of what I wanted, but then also saw this board with more expansion through PCI slots and went for this. Had to add an Intel PCI NIC, but since then the NAS has been running fine with no issues.

Pros: Very low power and quiet. Decent performance when it works. HDMI output.

Cons: The AsusMedia PCI controller can momentarily hang windows or can cause a disable IRQ in linux. Search "ASM1083 PCIe-PCI bridge chipset" and look at widespread problems. Note that the Asusmedia PCI problem extends beyond just this board. Other PCI controllers can also have issues, just this one is the worst offender.

Other Thoughts: I have three of these boards, and they work most of the time. Two were for HTPC setups. However if you stream netflix, the board can hang causing dropped frames.

The third board I set up as a linux router. As previously noted, you have to install non-free firmware to get video. The interrupt issue, while on windows 7 just hangs for a while, on linux causes a disable IRQ #x (nobody cared). There are no firmware fixes for this as it is a hardware issue.

I do not recommend this board for either of these two applications. I'm now looking for replacements for all these systems.

Pros: Runs Debian Squeeze and Wheezy. Squeeze doesn't support the sensors through lm-sensors but Wheezy does. Wheezy requires firmware-linux and firmware-linux-nonfree in order for video to work.

Easy to use bios, board will boot USB drives for super easy OS install.

Cons: With wake on lan enabled in bios, the board will reboot itself when issued a shutdown command. I contacted Asus and their official answer was "this board does not support Linux". Would've been nice to know before purchase.

In order for board to shut down properly, wake on lan needs to be disabled in bios.

I've tried every version of Bios on Asus' website with the same results.

Pros: IEEE 1394 and SATA III connections. Running Windows 2003 server. 4 slots for plug-in cards. Low power and quiet. 4GB of1333 memory. No problems so far.

Cons: The supplied CD does not support Windows 2003. Installed ethernet driver from XP list. Then allowed the SW search the web (and the CD) for the rest of the drivers.

Other Thoughts: Using this board for home server running Windows 2003. Installed the supplied fan to have extra cooling.