ASUS M3N78-VM AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: This board is amazing hands down! It does everything that it states it can do. Some of the complaints about the sound drivers not working are not true, they just don't understand how to get them working, the integrated sound card works great! *See Below

Cons: The only Cons I see is the IDE port coming out the side instead of facing up, but I knew this before I bought it. Also when you reboot with the driver disk in, a RAID program will load and ask you to create a RAID disk. To get around this simply take the CD out of the drive and restart, lol. No biggie...

Overall Review: Ok here is how to install those sound drivers. First install the Chipset drivers from the disk and reboot. The chipset drivers include the LAN drivers and Geforce drivers. Next install the sound drivers and reboot. When you start back up Windows XP should automatically detect your new sound hardware, simply tell Windows to search on the disk (Usually D:) and it will find and install them itself, boom you have sound, no biggie... If you are running XP 64-bit like I am, you will need to install the XP 64 sound hotfix which is included on the driver disk also. You will need to open explorer and find the folder labeled "sound" and install the file in the "Hotfix" folder, or you can download the hotfix from Microsoft's website directly. This is not an Asus issue, this is for ALL sound drivers using XP 64. I had to do this with my Asrock and Gigabyte boards too. Any questions email me at fwguy1979@hotmail, I'd be happy to walk you through it.

Pros: It's an affordable choice for an HTPC project. Nvidia chipset is well supported in Linux. Has onboard HDMI (which worked under Linux without any special config). Playback of full 1080p content (from a samba share, no less) works great. BIOS has jumperless overclocking options, though I haven't had the need/desire to try it out. mATX form factor itself is a pro in my opinion.

Cons: Onboard sound under Ubuntu took a minute to figure out, but not a big deal. Just add 'rmmod snd_hda_intel; modprobe snd_hda_intel' to /etc/rc.local so that the module is reloaded at the END of the bootup sequence, and it works. Still trying to get audio over HDMI to work though :-/ Also, XvMC is not supported with geforce 8200 but that's nvidia's choice. VDPAU is a suitable alternative but MythTV needs to be compiled from source to take advantage. This just means it takes a bit more time and effort to get an HTPC up to snuff with this board than some would like.. That and the difficulty with audio-over-HDMI are the reasons I'm giving this board a 4 instead of a 5. It's still an excellent choice and I've been recommending it to my other friends who run MythTV.

Overall Review: I'm using this board as part of a home-brew HTPC project with MythTV. I'm running MythBuntu 8.10 (based on 32bit Ubuntu 8.10) and it's running great with only a few minor issues. My system: ASUS M3N78-VM AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e 2.6Ghz 2x2GB GSkill case: Rosewill R379-SM Black/ Silver

Pros: Solid specs for under $80.00. Supports newest Phenon II cpu's. Probably the greatest thing about this mobo is that it will support ddr2 1066 if you use ALL 4 slots!! (see other thoughts)

Cons: WHY do company's make things difficult? I have always wanted to know how they come up with "ideas"...this board has 5 sata's, however they are broken down in two groups (2 sata's in 1 channel, and 3 sata's in the rest). If you dont want to run any specific raid, and you leave the board to its default settings, you lose the 2 sata channel because it only supports Raid and AHCI. WHY?? Why can't we just have all 5 in IDE... Also I am still kinda new to overclocking..this board from what I can tell isn't very friendly. Most of the other boards I have used, allow overclocking voltage by increasing the amt in the value of volts, this board using millivolts.... Yeah I googled the conversion table, but all of the ram and CPU's i see being sold today, list the Volts not the millivolts...kinda hard to google if this was your only pc and you were stuck in the bios (again, I am not fluent in the art of overclock, perhaps there is reason for this madness..)

Overall Review: As mentioned in the pro, i have worked with a LOT of Am2+ boards and most people have discovered that allot of Am2+ boards will only support 1066 ram with 1 dimm per channel. I purchased 4 1gb ram sticks(N82E16820104012) that was on the QVL list, and with a quick change in the bios (go to the memory config, and manually selected 533MHz (default was 200MHz), and I was able to boot up and see my ram running at 1066!!! For your everyday user looking to build a decent mobo, this is a serious pick. Built in video card ranks a wooping 4.7 in the vista scale. Much better than ANY of our recent HP business desktops that cost more than this pc build. We are running this board with the above listed ram and the Am2+ Phenon II 940, with 4 1tb Seagate hard drives, this is our own NAS for Imaging (ghost & acronis). Currently we are running vista business however we are looking at installing win server. As always, feel free to gmail my nickname with questions or comments

Pros: This motherboard has me fairly happy. The integrated graphics card is handling basic games such as world of warcraft at fairly high settings with no hiccups.. Easy install with no problems.

Cons: After two days, one of the back USB ports just stopped working. No idea why. But I thought "Eh its okay, I have enough to spare" And I just moved it. Today, (about 3 weeks after purchased) yet another port stopped working. Moved it and now its fine. Top two USB ports in back aren't working now. I can't use my webcam anymore =[ But what can you expect for such a cheap board.

Overall Review: I'm overall happy with it. Video card runs very cool with only one 80MM fan as an exhaust in the back. So good board in that sense. Wish my ports didn't hate me. But oh well. Im content. Everything else works perfectly.

Pros: nice stable board-hdmi & dvi- plenty of sata connects-ran extremely well for 10 months

Cons: board quit showing video after 10 months.tried everything to get it back. asus was NO help.Don't call the number that is listed@ Newegg. DISCONECTED This was my first asus board and my last. Going back to GIGABYTE or ECS

Pros: Great features, HDMI and eSATA are a nice touch. IGP NVIDIA chip is fast.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: I wrote a three-egg review complaining about HDCP and I need to correct it - While the fact that the mobo has HDCP components *should* have been made visible on the specs section, it doesn't affect the resolution through normal monitors. I'm running the computer now at 1920x1200 via DVI on a non-HDCP, 24" LCD monitor. Oops. I made an amateur blunder and I apologize to ASUS and the community for spreading misinformation.

Pros: Works great - just like you would expect from ASUS. Lots of great features, even better price.

Cons: This is my third go-round with this board - the first two were DOA, [however it is a possibility the motherboards died as a result of a bad CPU. This would be a first for me in over 30 years of building literally thousands of PCs, but I've learned that anything is possible.] The DVD they sent with the drivers was no good - in fact I think it's blank (unrecorded.) I was able to download all the drivers (use the download manager, they are quite large) and utilities.

Overall Review: This motherboard has a limited, 'instant on' operating system that functions rather well. It works perfectly for guest access (since all that can be done is internet browsing and skype.) I think with all the features included, this motherboard is a bargain.

Pros: Built-in HDMI and the 8200 chipset can do hardware decoding for video and 7.1 lpcm for audio. On paper, it's the perfect HTPC motherboard, but...

Cons: Hardware interrupts prevent the board from working smoothly. I have a dual core 45watt processor on here, and the second core was running at 100% usage, all due to hardware interrupts. It turned out to be the ethernet port when it's in use (eg utorrent running in the background, many firefox windows, etc), and a driver direct from Nvidia reduced the interrupts from 100% to only 50-75% on the second core, but it's still there. Also, DXVA is supported, but hardware interrupts show up here too. When I am using DXVA, hardware interrupts keep the second core at about 50% usage.

Overall Review: I bought this board for use in a HTPC, along with a 4050e processor and 4GB RAM. I've tried both XP and Vista (both 32 bit), and the hardware interrupts aren't fixed by the different driver versions. I really wanted to like this board, but it just won't work correctly for my needs. It will work fine for most, but the excessive hardware interrupts need to be fixed.