I'm looking at buying this motherboard: asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1283&l1=3&l2=101&l3=300
It has an ADi AD1988B that it comes with. I've been wondering if it is supported in FreeBSD. I've asked around the ALSA users mailing list, to no avail. If anyone knows anything about how this is supported in BSD (or Linux), I'd appreciate it.

Not sure about the asus crosshair, but I can't get audio to work on Asus M2N SLI Delux. They use same audio chipset...
It might be a bios problem tho, and the crosshair might work.

Goodluck.

Hi, I have been trying to install Suse on an Asus M2N motherboard. 10.1 did not detect my cdrom drive, network or sound cards. I have been playing with the factory release of 10.2, which is going much better. It found the Nvidia Ethernet controller (although I had to manually load the module in the setup program) and got the cdrom automatically. So all that was left was the soundcard, which proved to be tricky.

I found this kernel module patch on the internet for the hda_intel.c module: ttp://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0610.3/1989.html

it seems that the intel driver does work with the new chipsets, it simply does not know it! So I got the sources for the kernel, opened hda_intel.c, search for the line

'0x10de, 0x026c, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, AZX_DRIVER_NVIDIA'

which is the identifier for the MCP51 audio controller and added the lines for the MCP61 (which is what I have) afterwards. I then recompiled the kernel and kernel modules and rebooted. Running alsaconfig then detected my soundcard and I also set it up using yast. I'm not sure which audio controller you have but the patch contains entries for the MCP61 up to the MCP67.

Hope this helps

That's strange - I've just bought an M2N-SLI Deluxe and installed debian etch (testing) on it with no problems (other than having to specify noapic).
The audio driver module is snd_hda_intel. Audio works fine and sounds good from a music player for instance, although I've noticed it doesn't always work well; in particular UT2004 will only have sound if nothing else is using the sound card, and then it still sounds scratchy (never had this problem with my old SBLive 5.1 - probably it's typical of onboard though).
Everything else has been working fine - IDE, the nvidia SATA (haven't tried the JMicron controller), ethernet, etc.

I have found that out-dated linux discs haven't worked very well, so I suggest you try something more up-to-date to install from.

Hi

Im really not sure but maybe snd_hda will take care of this? Youre best off with RELENG_6 or CURRENT(shudder) if you want to use it. There are binaries too if this turns out to be what you need.

The Nvidia 570 and 590 chip boards have mostly "HD" audio if Im not mistaken. These are difficult to get working under freebsd. Linux, I am not sure about.

My advice: I always keep a few 5.1 pci cards around like a CMI8738 6ch card and a SB Live 5.1 card. These both are supported very well under linux/bsd and put out good sound. Not audiophile quialty but I know most linux/bsd users, if it plays my mp3s/movies/games, good enough for me.