A year or so ago I bought an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard for use in a media centre PC. This board stood out as it allows me to run a low end Sempron processor as so keep the system temperature down and it also includes a decent on board graphics chip (Geforce 6150) with tv-out included, thereby removing the need for a separate graphics card. The motherboard also features Asus’s Q-Fan which self monitors the cpu and system temperatures and adjusts the fans appropriately without the need for further fan control software like Speedfan.

This motherboard is a microATX board as that is what I needed for my Silverstone LC11M mediaPC case but unlike many mATX boards it comes with four DIMM slots which I needed as I already had the RAM that I wanted to use left over from previous upgrades and it is in the form of four 256 Mb modules.

First Impressions
Well packaged and complete with everything you could need. The TV-Out function is through an addon PCI backplate that connects via a cable to the board, also included is a backplate with firewire again connecting to the board via a cable which would be useful if your case doesn’t support firewire. There’s the usual paper manual included with several added slips of paper covering all the extra things that they forgot to put in the manual and of course a plethora of cables. The cables are Asus branded and look like they are good quality cables.

Installation
The motherboard screwed down without any difficulties and none of the cables got in the way of anything or have problems reaching to their destination, so that was good. The manual has clear instructions on where everything should be plugged in. I installed an AM2 AMD Sempron 3000+ and installed the retail packaged HSF. The HSF fitted to the retention module after the expected small amount of wiggling, however do beware that the memory slots are quite close to the CPU socket so an oversize cooler might not fit. I know that the new Zalman 8000 low profile cooler does fit but obscures the first memory slot.

My Setup
As already mentioned I’ve installed a Sempron 3000+ and put the motherboard into a Silverstone LC11M media centre case. I’ve added to that, four 256Mb DDR2 533Mhz Samsung DIMMs running at 4,4,4,11, a Samsung Spinpoint 160Gb SATA2 HDD, a DVD-RW drive and a KWorld DVB-T 355U digital USB TV tuner. All this powers Windows XP Media Centre Edition operating system. I am using the integrated graphics and the integrated sound as I wanted to keep the system simple, cool and quiet.

I have the system connected to my Panasonic widescreen CRT TV as it’s only display, via the S-video connection. I’ve also connected a Linksys USB wireless 802.11g adapter. The Silverstone case comes with a VFD screen and remote control which I use as standard and I have a mini USB keyboard that I connect for occasional text input.

Performance
Obviously the performance of a motherboard is difficult to quantify as it will vary depending on what other hardware is used but as I’ve already stated my specs above hopefully this will give you an idea of how well it performs. The system performs well in normal XP tasks and will play recorded TV smoothly through MCE. It also has no problems playing DVDs, WMA music files and all the other things that a media PC is expected to do. I have also run SuperPI, although this is more of a test of the processor and it managed a time of 52secs for the 1M test. Not a ground breaking score but better than the 1m 06 that my P4 2.8Ghz 533fsb Northwood managed in an Intel motherboard. In Futuremark’s PCMark05 the system scores 2169 and in 3DMark03 it scores 1364, again hardly going to frighten a gaming rig but good enough for what I built it for. Unfortunately I don’t have anything better than a pair of stereo speakers on my TV so I can’t really comment on the HD integrated sound, it sounds OK.

What I was impressed by was that when I installed Battlefield2 on it I was able to play it smoothly, at 800×600 with low settings, but I was happy that it played at all on an integrated GPU! At least I know that at a push I can use the system as an extra system when the guys come over for a LAN gaming session.

Software
Hardware cannot be improved by the bundled software/drivers, however often hardware is held back or crippled by it’s software! The Asus M2NPV-VM comes with a CD with the appropriate drivers and some non essential utilities. I installed the drivers immediately after finishing the XP install, however the nvidia chipset drivers caused the PC to be unable to reboot, resulting in re-installing XP. Putting it down to a freak mishap I did the same again and unfortunately got the same result. By this time I’d installed XP three times, so I resorted to downloading the latest drivers from the Asus website and installing those, this worked without any problems at all but I was very disappointed that the bundled CD caused such problems.

The included PCProbe2 system monitoring software has a horrible looking GUI and is lacking in useful features and is generally annoying. So I’ve uninstalled that and I’ve installed Everest to monitor my temps and fan speeds.

BIOS & Overclocking
I updated the BIOS to the latest version as only the latest version allows you to allocate 256Mb of memory to the GPU, the previous versions had a 128Mb limit. The BIOS seems to contain most of the basic features, boot order, memory timing etc. It also contains some overclocking features, there are four OC modes AUTO / STANDARD / AI / MANUAL. I haven’t managed to find any difference between auto and standard as of yet, however the AI option allows you to choose from some preset OC options and the manual mode allows you to set things manually. The AI presets are 3%, 5%, 8% and 10%, these are are percentage increases in the HTT bus speed and affect the cpu and memory clocks. There’s a completely separate setting for memory clock, so you can manually set 400, 533, 800 and still use the AI OC. The manual OC allows you to increase the bus speed by increments of 1Mhz, however there’s no way to drop the HTT bus multiplier and my board wouldn’t POST with anything above 225 HTT bus speed and this might be the reason. At all times the BIOS keeps the PCI and PCI-E clocks locked at 33 and 100 respectively which is sensible. Anyway, the most I managed to OC my setup was to a HTT of 225 which took my Sempron from 1600 to 1800 and that was with the memory set at it’s auto settings taking it to 600Mhz, 4,4,4,11. However I have not left my setup at this OC as setting any kind of OC automatically sets the CPU Spread Spectrum to ‘Disabled’ and this for some reason prevents my system from coming out of ‘Suspend to RAM’ standby.

One of the features of the BIOS that I was eager to use was the Q-Fan feature. ASUS Q-Fan controls your system’s fans to minimise noise but to provide sufficient cooling as required. I’m sure a lot of motherboards have similar features but my previous Intel one didn’t and neither does my ASRock motherboard in my desktop PC. In fact it’s suprising how few motherboards do actually have fan control built in, meaning the need for either quiet fans or a fan controller of some sort. Anyway, the Q-fan feature seems to work well, the CPU and case fans are kept at around 800-1200 rpm in normal media centre use and the temperatures stay between 30 and 40 degrees. The motherboard provides 4 3-pin fan connectors but unfortunately only the CPU and SYS1 connectors are compatible with Q-fan, so I just used a 3-pin splitter cable to run two fans from the SYS1 connector. The other slight disappointment is that the Q-fan BIOS option is limited to ‘Enabled/Disabled’, whereas I was hoping for some control over how much the fans were controlled.

Conclusion
I’m generally pleased with the motherboard as it does what I bought it for. I’m impressed by the ability of the integrated GPU to run fairly modern games, abeit at low quality. Also there really isn’t much choice for a motherboard with integrated TV-out at the cheap end of the scale, so it is the best option by ‘default’ almost. However, if you don’t want the TV-out or integrated GPU then I can’t see any reason for choosing it. It doesn’t overclock very well at all and there are cheaper motherboards if you’re looking for a bottom end build. However it does what it says on the packet and most importantly is perfectly stable.

Pros:
Integrated GPU is the best available
Integrated HD Sound
Integrated TV-out (inc composite, component and S-Video)
Stable
Fan control
4 x DIMM slots on mATX

Cons:
Poor overclock options/ability
Not cheap enough to be really cheap
CPU socket too close to first DIMM slot for oversize coolers.

8/10

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