muddysmind.com

Asus A7V8X and ALSA

Folks, Skywalker here. I have to tell you about my new motherboard. My old motherboard (a very faithful Abit KT7-Raid) was hit my lightning. Results were that I had to replace it. Well it used SDRAM not DDR-SDRAM. So I also had to replace my Gigabyte of ram, which was over $300 alone!!!!! But, I digress.

Read on!

At first I took home an MSI board which had great features for the most part, even had an optional bluetooth piece. The problem was that whenever I would reboot from linux I'd lose USB all-together! Not kewl.

Took it back to the store (I used to work there) and my friend at the store exchanged it for an Asus board.

It has:
6 USB 2.0 ports
2 IEEE 1394 ports (A and B type, one each)
on-board 5.1 audio including SPDIF in and out
6 PCI slots
AGP 8x
DDR 400 support
333MHz max front side bus
2 VIA IDE ports
ATA Raid with 2 Serial ATA plugs and 1 ATA plug
On-board 10/100 Etherney

With it, I bought an Athlon XP 2000+ (the next one up had to big of a price jump) and 1 Gigabyte of DDR-SDRAM (Kingston, 333MHz.)

The performance has been great, stability has been great. I've been running it for 3 days now with not one lock-up or even a slight stability problem. Mind you, I've mostly been using Linux but there you go. I've been getting ~90 FPS in Quake 3 (Linux) and over 100FPS in Unreal Tournament.

Another nice feature was the ethernet. There is an option on this board for 10/100/1000 ethernet, but unfortunately the store didn't have any with that feature in-stock. But, the CD had a GPLed source provided driver for the ethernet chip. It compiled cleanly, no warning and worked immediately, no weird configuration was necesary.

Now here come the negatives.

The MSI board I originally bought, had a nice feature where it would scan the outboard (as in non VIA southbridge) hard disk controllers for bootable devices and made them options when configuring your boot sequence. The Asus just didn't have that. The problem being that the MSI used an Ami BIOS if I recall that correctly, where as the Asus uses an Award BIOS. I personally preferred the Ami BIOS, it had alot more options as far as front side bus adjustment. The Award BIOS however had been easier to configure.

The other problem I had was the on-board sound's configuration in linux. It worked right off the bat except in games that use OpenAL. I don't know why honestly. But it did. I fixed this by updating to the CVS version of ALSA. Worked with no problems after that. I also tried the comercial OSS drivers but the sound was really tinny and distorted with them for some reason. They also are less multimedia oriented (in my opinion) than the ALSA drivers. Not to mention that I didn't feel like shelling out the $20 for them. Configuration was basically the same as always for the sound other than that.

On the Windows side of things, I use Windows XP. Everything installed, cleanly no problems. One complaint is that the sound driver's in Windows don't seem to want to let me force use of the SPDIF output. I don't know why, but it won't and it is really annoying me! If I figure out why I'll let you all know.

Well, that's my rant about my lovely new motherboard. Skywalker out!

Posted by at November 15, 2002 11:28 AM