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I have now fitted a Terratec sound card that works perfectly. Very annoying, I had windows on this machine for a little while and I think the sound was okay but I am trying to remember if things went wrong with a bios update. Basically I think this chipset/motherboard is a load of crap. There is nothing like persistent problems to really turn you off to a product, and for the price I expected much better. The bios was not ready when the board was launched. The power issue for a start was really nasty, I thought the whole thing was going to blow-up. I have also heard that people trying to get the hybrid-power stuff working in windows are have all kinds of fun with the system crashing.
I think I have everything stable now, sound via a PCI card. The on-board ethernet seems to be fine with Opensuse 11 and my graphics card is working well.
I totally agree. For $250 this board should damn near make me breakfast every morning in addition to working properly. I can honestly say that this is the first time that I have been seriously disappointed in an Asus product. My last board was an A8V-SLI Premium and it ran like a dream. Getting the M3N-HT working thus far has been a pain in the ass.
I went out and bought a cheap SoundBlaster Audigy SE card last night and popped it in to the board, sound is working perfectly fine in Linux with the SB card. The onboard sound is a POS which is dissapointing since it's described in the BIOS as "HD" which of course stands for High Definition. As far as I can tell, in this case "HD" actually stands for Hard Dick, because just when you think you have everything working it bends you over and screws you in to buying a PCI soundcard. I seriously hope that fixing the onboard audio is just a matter of updating the BIOS again or something, but who knows?
At this time my system is running stable, the onboard ethernet, my graphics card, and the SB Audigy are all working fine with Kubuntu. Really the only pro so far about this board (other than the fact that <sarcasm>it's been a heck of a lot of fun resolving the various issues</sarcasm>) is that it runs really cool. The board is maintaining a stable temperature of 35 degrees celsius even when the processor is running up to 10 degrees hotter (though that is to be expected since the board is decked out in copper).
The audio problems does appear to be BIOS related.
with the 0603 and 0702 bios I get great sound
0804 and 0901 results in poppy and staticy sound which has me thinking it's some kind of buffer issue.
This bit of info was buried in an update to ExpressGate that you can't install without Windows. Unless the updater works in Wine, I don't fancy trying that!
I'm not certain if that patch was applied upstream to the kernel or as part of the Gentoo patch set but it has already been applied to the kernel sources I've been using as of late (corrupt sound with BIOS 0804 and 0901) which would be 2.6.25-gentoo-r4 and it does show me as having 1.0.16
Looking at my the old 2.6.24-gentoo-r7 source directory I still have kicking around, the patch wasn't applied so I'm thinking a Kernel upgrade to 2.6.25 and a BIOS downgrade to 0703 may fix your on-board sound.
Although the suggestion of the express gate update does have me curious as to what what mischief I can make. Hopefully I can figure out how Asus has it configured.
I'm still having sound issues with this board, its all jerky and corrupt. Anyone else had problems with sound?
Hi sniff,
try to downgrade BIOS to version 0702.
I own this MoBo, mainly for desktop (64bit Gentoo Linux), and for games (32bit Win XP).
After I upgraded BIOS to version 0804, there was sound problem while playing any music. The problem was in "Asus Express Gate"*, too. I tried to upgrade to latest BIOS (10xx version), but it didn't help - in Win XP, there were no sound problems.
After I reverted back to BIOS ver 0702, the sound problems stopped (I use kernel "linux-2.6.25-gentoo-r6").
I tried to write to ASUS's tech. support to tell them they have "bug" in BIOS, but I've received reply from "my local support" (ASUS Czech Republic) - they told me that "ASUS company does not do Linux support" and the problem is in (ALSA) sound drivers.
thiemel, do me a favour and write them back asking them how they don't do Linux support when their expressgate system actually runs on linux. Also, ask them that if it's a bug in Alsa, why did expressgate sound work perfectly fine before upgrading to the latest BIOS release. Obviously something changed, and I'm willing to bet it was the BIOS as I didn't receive any Alsa updates before or after I upgraded the BIOS yet the problem suddenly appeared. Also, just a note. I understand that it's apparently possible to flash expressgate with a newer version so that it works properly, but apparently this requires a windows utility (go figure).
thiemel, do me a favour and write them back asking them how they don't do Linux support when their expressgate system actually runs on linux. Also, ask them that if it's a bug in Alsa, why did expressgate sound work perfectly fine before upgrading to the latest BIOS release. Obviously something changed, and I'm willing to bet it was the BIOS as I didn't receive any Alsa updates before or after I upgraded the BIOS yet the problem suddenly appeared. Also, just a note. I understand that it's apparently possible to flash expressgate with a newer version so that it works properly, but apparently this requires a windows utility (go figure).
Cheers,
Ryan
Hi,
I'm still in contact with Technical Support Department ASUS Czech republic. Few minutes ago, I replied them that I'm concerned because I wanted to report a "BIOS bug" but it seems that nobody listens to me. I'll see how it will continue...
I recently purchased a M3N-HT motherboard along with an AMD Phenom x4 9850+ Black Edition.
I had several roadblocks which I ran in to while getting the system setup and getting Linux (Kubuntu) installed on it. Now, Kubuntu is my personal preference for my desktop machines since it is quick and easy to setup. I use Gentoo on my servers, you can pretty much use any Linux distro that you want, but I'll simply be covering the exact steps that I took with Kubuntu.
First off, the BIOS issues. When I finally got the machine all setup and ready to go I powered it on and was shocked to see that it was rapidly powering on and off, and cycling. I killed the power thinking that perhaps it was a problem with the power supply. I had just bought the power supply brand new, and it's a 1000watt power supply, so it's not like the board wasn't getting enough power. I researched the issue online and found several people were having similar issues with the same motherboard/processor combo. I finally tracked down what the problem was. It turns out that the M3N-HT ships with an older version of the BIOS which does not play well with some Phenom processors, especially the 9850+ BE. I downloaded the latest BIOS update (0901) off of Asus' site, extracted the 0901.ZIP file and burned the 0901.BIN file to a CD. To get the system to boot I had to reset the CMOS using the reset jumper located just next to the battery. The system would only boot normally if I reset this jumper. Once the system was up and stable I went in to the BIOS and went to the tools section. I fired up the EZFlash 2 utility and inserted the CD. I selected to flash the BIOS and away it went (while I held my breath I might add). The BIOS flash completed successfully and the system rebooted. After the BIOS update everything worked perfectly.
Ok, so now I had a working system and obviously wanted to take advantage of that by installing an OS on it. I have 2 500GB Western Digital SATA drives in the machine. I threw in my Kubuntu CD and loaded it up. I started the installation and went through the steps. When it came time for the installer to detect the drives I was greeted with a blank window where the drives would normally be displayed after being detected. Linux apparently prefers AHCI to IDE for SATA handling, so I went in to the BIOS and changed the value from IDE to AHCI. I then saved the settings and rebooted the system. I ran the installer again but, yet again, it did not detect my drives. I booted the Kubuntu CD again, I highlighted the install option on the Kubuntu boot screen and then hit F6 which provided me with the boot line at the bottom. I added pci=nomsi at the end of the line and hit enter. The Kubuntu installer came up and I went through the steps again. It finally detected my drives and I was able to successfully install Kubuntu. From that point on everything went very smoothly and I was able to boot from my primary SATA drive with no issues.
Almost everything worked fine in linux (even the two onboard network cards). The only thing that I've yet to get working properly is the sound. I configured Alsa and do have sound coming out of the speakers but it is fuzzy (static) and heavily distorted. To describe the distortion, if I were to play back the word "well" in a video it would come out as "well..ell..ell..ell..ell......" along with static. I hear static intermittently even when no audio is playing at all. I tried playing around with alsamixer, adjusting various values and muting and unmuting channels but nothing has worked so far. I'm probably just going to go pick up a cheap SoundBlaster Audigy for $30 and pop it in to one of the PCI slots then disable the onboard. I'm quite dissapointed by the quality of the audio in Linux, more so because the onboard "ExpressGate" software is based on Linux and the exact same issues occur when I boot in to ExpressGate and play a YouTube video. Either my motherboard is defective or Asus totally struck out on this one. Can anyone with this board please boot in to ExpressGate and attempt playing a YouTube video? I would like to know if you experience the same issues. I've been searching around online and found that many people are.
Thanks, and hope this helps some people to get up and going in linux with this board.
Cheers,
Ryan
hi Ryan,
I recently purchased an AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition processor with the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/mempipe. I immediately found out that the booting problems were due to a faulty BIOS--the one that came with mine is 0702. Well not immediately--I panicked at first. I thought that my Enermax 625W PSU couldn't handle the Phenom with 4GB of DDR2 and the other peripherals. Could you make a copy of your bootable CD with 0901 BIOS version for my Asus M3N-HT motherboard. It would save me trouble. Would you accept paypal as payment ?
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