ZOTAC GF9300-A-E LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Board runs fine after I finally got Windows XP installed. Decode was <10% for h.264 content recorded on a Hauppauge HDPVR and <20% for MPEG2 OTA recordings using an E5200.

Cons: The BIOS ignores the boot order you set in the BIOS. I tried every combination. I even set ALL THREE boot devices to the CD-ROM and it would go directly to the HD instead. It took a couple of days to realize that pressing ESC during post would bring up the actual boot menu. I could not boot from the DVD drive AT ALL until I figured this one out. You can see the message if you disable all the splash screens and enable the long system check. That way, it stays on the post screen long enough to see the prompt to press ESC. Scroll down and select the CD-ROM. I read that this same menu comes up with F12 on the Gigabyte board.

Overall Review: None

Pros: Built in Nvidia 9300 graphics, with HDMI, DVI and VGA. Low overall cost for this type of board (especially with recent rebate). Perfect fit for revamping my 4 year old MythTV system. I have it up and running with MythBuntu for a week using HDMI for video and audio without any major issues.

Cons: No display port has been talked about, but for my application, HDMI, DVI and VGA are more than adequate. Also, I did run into the issue that others had talked about regarding the strange issues detecting boot devices. Mine would not see the primary PATA harddrive, but it would it see my SATA drive that I had intended to use as storage only. I reset the plan and just used the SATA as I did not have time to figure out this issue. I also see a strange horizontal waviness in top 1/3 of the display when playing back with VDPAU. It only happens with motion in the frame and is only slightly annoying. I am hoping this is only a drive issue that will rectify itself. The board is more than adequate to playback without VDPAU with a E5200 and 2GB of RAM, but VDPAU is nice to offload to allow processor to do commercial marking and transcoding.

Overall Review: Again, an overall great system for a combined MythTV backend and front end. Newegg is still the best overall place to get hardware from. Keep up the good work.

Pros: I bought this motherboard to design around a HTPC to mostly playback Blu Ray movies. Most know that HD content can be a struggle for some PCs especially ones where you ask them to use the onboard video (IGP). This one delivers. I'm using an E8400 Core2Duo processor (no overclocking) with 4 gigs of A-data ram. It plays Blu Ray and averages between 10 - 15% CPU utilization on one of the cores during playback! That is saying a lot for onboard graphics. So far so good.

Cons: Be aware that by default the BIOS for this motherboard uses IDE and not AHCI. If you do not enable AHCI the 5th and 6th SATA input on the motherboard will not be enabled. Unfortunately, I found this out the hard way and thought a hard drive was bad when it wasn't. Also, this motherboard came with the wrong I/O panel. It reversed where DVI and VGA are supposed to be. I wrote Zotac an e-mail and they were aware of the issue and sent me the correct I/O panel but it will be a bit of a pain having to break down the PC again once it arrives to install it. I was able to drill holes in the one they did send and it is working OK.

Pros: Have had this board for over a week. paired it with a was bumed out the gigabyte 9400 board was discontinued and had waitwd for a replacement which was never released so ijumped on this one used a core2duo@2.8 ghz(not oced) and 2gb of ram this board is working awesome. have it in my htpc. works awesome supports 5.1 and 7.1 dolby digital and dts . has native hdmi support. i plugged this machine to my receiver via hdmi before i loaded win7 and i was able to view my bios off the bat on my projector. i highly recommend it. so far everythimg is good. i can stream my 1080p stuff flawlessly

Cons: wished it had the 9400 gphx

Pros: This motherboard is small and does its job well without issue. Fits in my HTPC case without any issues and has all of the ports / sockets I could ask for. Has decent on board video that has so far run everything I needed it to with ease (emulators like Project64 and some HD video). The fact that it has ALL the typical forms of video out (HDMI, DVI, and VGA) was an awesome addition. I use this build as a video server / TV connected computer so not having to buy an HDMI out ready graphics card to throw in this computer was totally sweet. Please read the both the Cons and Other Thoughts section below for important details!!

Cons: This was a little expensive for a mostly antique motherboard. I only say this however because it's an LGA775 motherboard. There are plenty of modern motherboard that work with i7's and such that are not much more expensive at all than this and are cutting edge. This is my only complaint however, and other than that the motherboard has proven its worth so far. If you are going to use this motherboard for HDMI output to a TV, you will NEED to go to ZOTAC's website and get the onboard HDMI audio nvidia driver. If you do not do this you will see HDMI output to your TV for one or two seconds every minute or so. This is extremely weird but that download from ZOTAC's website definitely fixed it. Please read the Other Thoughts section below for more important details!!

Overall Review: IMPORTANT: If you are going to use this motherboard with Windows 7 (in my case 64bit, but you should probably read this anyway if you are going to be using 32bit) be EXTREMELY careful with installing Windows Updates for the first time. You see, my typical way of installing Windows Updates for a brand new build is just to go down that big ol' list and check them all off and then let the computer do it's thing for an hour or two. You do NOT want to do that for this motherboard. This is most likely not the motherboard's fault that this happens but one particular update for me would ALWAYS (happened 3 separate times) bring down the entire system with a BSoD and require a reformat. The update is this: "nVidia - Display, Other hardware - NVIDIA GeForce 9300 / nForce 730i". It's an optional hardware update that was released in May 2011. Make sure to set this update as hidden and then go to ZOTAC's actual website to get your drivers.

Pros: 1) Onboard HDMI is great for a HTPC, but gamers / power users would definitely need to utilize a graphics card. 2) I've had a very positive experience with Zotac's customer service. The rebate process seemed to be taking longer than I expected so I contacted their service department. They expedited my rebate and I received the check today. 3) I've used the board in my HTPC for 3 months and it's been completely trouble free 4) Installation was a breeze - it fired right up and I had no problems 5) Factory fan over north bridge heat sink - it kinda gives me piece of mind

Cons: 1) nVidia Graphics Software actually degrades performance. Windows 7 will grab the video driver, but the nVidia software is installed separately. After installing the nVidia software my Windows performance score went down and the computer could not push iTunes visualizer **I RECOMMEND letting Windows find the driver but avoid installing the nVidia graphics sofware** 2) Not quite complete user manual & lacking codes - although I've never needed them up to the this review

Overall Review: My friend and I built almost identical HTPC's using this board - he's had a very similar / positive experience but didn't publish a review. I would like to note that the onboard graphics are just enough to push your typical HD movie (.mkv file) / iTunes visualizer. Anyone that wants to do serious gaming will need to add a video card. I use this computer for nothing more than playing movies / TV shows - and it works extremely well for that task. HTPC Build Includes: Zotac GF9300-A-E Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93 GHz) G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 800 SDRAM (yes, only 2GB of RAM due to the limited function I desired out of the computer) 2 TB SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI (tons of storage and no problems yet, although I do regularly backup) GIGABYTE GN-WP01GS PCI Wireless Adapter Antec NSK2480 case - it's pretty slick

Pros: 10 months later and still going strong. Runs windows 7 without a problem.

Cons: None

Overall Review: WILL RUN A X3220 Xeon Quad Core, and I love it.

Pros: I've had this Mother board for just over a week. Been running none stop with no problems. Components seemed to be high quality with no issues. Installation was simple. Plus I've successfully configured a dual boot system with Windows XP and OpenSuse 11.1 running the latest kernel and Nvidia graphics drivers. Just follow the linux tips for manually installing the driver and don't bother with the Yast install or One click install.

Cons: Not a fault of the Motherboard, but depending on your case, you'll need to be careful on RAM choices. In my HEC 7KJ9 case, the CD rom is right above the RAM. You might not be able to use those high performance RAM chips with the tall heat sinks. Also the the Power supply cables with this combo are a tight fit as the PS cables aren't quite long enough to reach the MB header As for Zotac customer support, I had no luck going though the phone support, but did have luck with the online support chat. Seemed my drivers CDRom disk was bad, and the main Zotac.com site was down when I needed to download drivers. Customer support was able to get me alternative links

Overall Review: For the price you can't beat this motherboard with all the features it does offer. Makes one heck of a nice system for less then $400