ASUS M2NPV-VM AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Not much fuzz about this board. Easy to install, clear layout of headers, ample connectivity to periferals, on-board video and a rock-stable board in general. And nice to see Gigabit-Ethernet.

Cons: I give in that 99% of the customers won't need it, but in one installation I was missing the Serial port backplane connector (For a ticket printer) I would rather prefer a serial port on the backplane than a Dsub-25 parallel port. Serial devices are in widespread use, parallel printers are mostly displaced by USB-connected printers nowadays.

Overall Review: I read comments about "picky about memory". When I ordered the 12 boards we use in our Internet Café, I paid a great deal of attention to that issue. But "out of stock constraints" made me buy 3 different brands of memory chips:(#: N82E16820150350,#: N82E16820145528,#: N82E16820218092), and they ALL work on this board. Bottom line: A Mobo should not be evaluated taking everything to the extreme (OC-ing), but under conditions where it is designed to clock right. Out of the 12 M2NPV-VM we bought, I had zero issues with this Mobo.

Pros: 6150 graphics DVI on-board, makes this useful right away, 16x PCIe allows easy upgrading graphics later. On-board graphics have been more than enough for everything I've needed, including some games, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. Ran an Athlon 64 X2 3800+, later upgraded to 5600+ with no problems. Running rock-solid for over 7 months with XP 32bit.

Cons: Drivers on included CD *and* on ASUS website are BADLY out of date. Get latest BIOS from ASUS and get current drivers directly from nVidia. Found a bug with internal SATA and Maxtor drives, requires setting Bios for Maxtor hard drive to "Large" instead of "Auto". ("Auto" worked fine for Western Digital and Seagate, odd, considering Seagate now owns Maxtor.)

Overall Review: One of the only microATX boards with on-board DVI graphics output. I'm using this as a HTPC with a WinTV-350 and BeyondTV, works flawlessly, streaming to a MediaMVP. Also doing duty as an audio editing workstation and photo editing running Adobe Audition 2.0 and Adobe Creative Suite 2. This has proven to be completely up to the challenge.

Pros: Motherboard works as intended. Install was easy, Hi-Def outputs are nice.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: THERE ARE ONLY CERTAIN TYPES OF MEMORY THAT WORK WITH THIS MOTHERBOARD. You don't have to "wait until you get it" to find out what these are as the last person said, just go to asus website and download the manual for this mobo in pdf form before you buy it like any responsible buyer would. It clearly lists what memory works with this motherboard. Easy easy problem to avoid, don't be an ameteur.

Pros: Supports every piece of your hardware (except some over-volted ram) and it even has a HDTV component output panel!! Geforce 6150 is powerful enough to play 1080p contents with my Athlon 3000+, but don't expect it to run 3D games properly even it is the fastest intergrated GPU on planet. Onboard CPU clock/fan/chassis fan dynaimic control made the whole system extremely quiet&cool, you don't hear any sound except your good old IDE hard drive. It also comes with lots of cables. The onboard GPU can work together with other Geforce cards to support more monitors.

Cons: It won't overclock. Buy DDR2 rams with working voltage lower than 1.9v. Spend 5 more dollars and get some heatsinks to stick on the chipsets, as they are now running much hotter than CPU.

Overall Review: You don't have many choices actually, 6150 is the only integrated GPU that lets you play HDTV smoothly, and this ASUS is the only board can output HDTV signal. When you buy a power supply or case, check it has BOTH 4 pin 12V and 24Pin power connectors. If you want to game someday, you can now buy a cheap&fast single core Athlon64 and get a monter GPU later. Most games don't run faster on Dual Cores (Benchmarks do).

Pros: Worked great with drivers loaded and bios was current. Great price for intended system with built in VGA so I saved the cost of a card and it works better than my old AGP 8x. Great price

Cons: none?

Overall Review: I don't know what the fuss was about... everyone warned about how hard this board was to get setup, etc... Now granted, I'm not using VISTA (SPEH!) but XP works great on it... Go figure. Maybe I just took my time to get it right? Doubt it.

Pros: Everything worked out of the box when installing CentOS 5 and Fedora 7

Cons: None

Overall Review: Good board for the onboard video, even though the video isn't the latest & greatest.

Pros: This board has it all, and it is well worth the price with all the options it offers. It was VERY easy to setup RAID within the BIOS, great quality sound for being onboard.

Cons: Onboard video is just alright. Depending on what you will use your PC for, you might want to look into a PCI-e video card upgrade.

Overall Review: I'm running this with; AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Kingston Model KVR667D2N5/1G RAM (x2), Vista Home Premium & two striped RAID hard drives. I couldn't ask for more out of a new PC. Vista recognized all compatible drivers, and I haven't had any problems. I didn't need to even use the driver install disc.

Pros: Lots of features at a fair price. On-board video comes with component-out and produces a great picture at 1080i on my TV. SPDIF out delivers excellent 5.1 sound over COAX (and presumably Optical, but I haven't tried that). Works great with MythTV.

Cons: Doesn't come with the SPDIF OUT bracket (SPDIF OUT/COA+OPT) which will set you back another 16 bucks.

Overall Review: I purchased this board to build a Home Theater PC and am quite happy with it. My system consists of the M2NPV-VM motherboard, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane 2.3GHz, and two Kingston ValueRAM 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300). CPU Cooling is provided by a Thermaltake CL-P0371 92mm. Everything is mounted in an Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case. Don't underestimate the amount of processing power you will need to work with HDTV. This system feels really peppy and I would have been happy to use it as my day-to-day business desktop.