ASUS AMD Athlon Motherboard (Asus M2NPV-VM)

Name: JGK555

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Product:	Asus M2NPV-VM
Date:	24.02.07 (538 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: HDTV output, supports AMDs Cool 'n' Quie

Disadvantages: Only one lan

The ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard for AMD single-core Athlon 64/ Sempron and Dual-core Athlon 64 X2/ Athlon FX processors using socket AM2 is very user friendly, I went with AMDs 64 x2 3800+ processor in the beginning then moved up to 4200+ 2Gb Ram without any hassle, very easy to setup and fits easily in a standard ATX case. A possible downside to the board is that it has a limited number of slots due to being a micro ATX sized board. That's not a big deal for me as the only two cards I'll be buying in the future is Graphics and a extra Lan card.

Board Layout
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>In the upper right hand corner of the motherboard are the ATX 24 pin power connector, Floppy disk connector, Game/Midi port connector and four DDR2 slots. These DDR2 slots support a maximum memory capacity of 8GB and the frequencies supported is DDR2-800MHz/667 MHz/533 MHz in dual channel. The four memory slots are positioned closely to the CPU socket area, which may cause some interference if using a wide heatsink.

>In the lower right hand corner of the motherboard is the four Serial ATA 2.0 ports, Primary & Secondary IDE connectors and 2 serial port connectors which are unfortunately not included on the backpanel and have to be bought separately if you still have a use for them that is.

>The expansion slot area has a primary PCI Express x16 slot, one PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots. Below them are Front panel audio connector for either High Definition or standard audio, Back/Front IEEE 1394a connector, 2 USB connectors for an extra 4 USB ports, and the Digital SPDIF_OUT connector.

>On the I/O panel there's two PS/2, 3 analog audio which support 5.1 surround sound, Parallel Port, VGA, DVI, one Firewire, four USB, and one Gigabit 10/100Mbps/1Gbps Ethernet interface.

Excellent Mobo for mutimedia
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>Integrated Sound-MAX High definition audio with a very user freindly interface, it has a set up wizard to configuration speakers, by going through four easy to follow steps it takes no-longer than a minute or two, it also has more advanced options for your preferences in general listing environment you can easily adjust the 5.1 speakers to different sound levels.

>A good feature about this board is that you don't have to mess about with the audio outputs. Some motherboards force you to disable the rear audio connectors before hooking up the cable leading to front connectors on a case, you can simply hook up the cable from the front of the case and not worry about it.

Surprisingly very good onboard graphics
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>The nvidia geforce 6150 GPU features a TV encoder, High Quality Video scaling, and dual video (DVI-D and RGB) outputs.
Although this board was probably targeted towards offices and home theater PCs its onboard graphics handles games pretty well, they do need to be set on lower settings but you can mess around with the fine tuning a bit, Using GTA San Andeas as an example... Visual FX Quality set to low works flawlessly you can put it up to medium with only slight jittering but does get worse infog/rain, you can leave everything else on normal settings or play around with Draw Distance and even put anti aliasing on 1x. Definitely not Gaming board but it does have the option to upgrade, using PCI-e slot for more power full graphics card.

Overclocking
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>I can't comment on the overclock abilities that some builders look for in a motherboard as I don't do it, I did see somewhere that the bios being too restrictive but with no knowledge of overclocking I can't judge it. performance has been spectacular for my needs.

Boards Features
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>A strong feature is the integrated NVIDIA RAID on the 4 SATA ports. That makes it easy to purchase a 2nd, 3erd, and 4th SATA drive and set the system up without extra hardware, and it also supports the new 3Gb/s hard drives.

>Plenty of USB ports 4 on the back and 2 connectors for and extra 4 usb ports, you can add them to the back or if your case has the option to the front, ideal for digital cameras, usb storage sticks etc. Also has a 2nd firewire port with backplate there's already one next to the usb ports.

>HDTV Output boasts higher resolution to 1080i and 720p format, which is clearer than traditional formats. Unfortunately I don't have a means to experience this so can't comment further.

>Near Silent running, using AMD Cool 'n' Quiet Technology which monitors system operations and automatically adjusts CPU voltage and frequency combined with Asus Q-Fan 2 technology which adjusts the fan speeds accordingly, the fans run slower when the system is idle and as soon as the temperature start to increase so do the fans.

Package contents
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>Plenty of cables, two serial ATA, one serial ATA power cable for two devices, one IEEE 1394a module.
One Ultra DMA 133/100/66 cable, one IDE cable, one Floppy disk cable which come in black with "Asus" printed on them.
Accessories, I/O backplate/Shield and a HDTV output module

Conclusion
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I'm very happy so far with the mother board, Seeing both VGA and DVI onboard is a nice addition, The High Speed Lan upto 100Gbps, High Speed SATA upto 3Gb/s and DDR2 memory were the main selling points for me, I needed a fast machine and got it using this board, also comes with the added bonus of HDTV, PCI Express slots for future upgrades, and High Definition Audio.
There's plenty of 64bit support, I never had any trouble finding drivers for windows xp professional x64 Edition online, and theres plenty of ways to further upgrade in the future.

Summary: High definition audio, HDTV Output, 64bit support, supported RAM DDR2-800MHz/667 MHz/533 MHz

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