[mythtv-users] Chaintech 7nif2 and sound

[Chris Thompson]

Boyd II, Willy (wboyd at fulbright.com) wrote:
> Does anyone know of the on-board sound for this board does hardware mixing?

I have this board but in my initial attempt to get mythfrontend working,
was unable to get any sound whatsoever. I blame ALSA, not the board. So I
can't answer that exact question with any certainty, yet.

> And does anyone have experience with the optional s/pdif adapter?  Some of
> the newest reviews on newegg are suggesting even the pinout is missing on
> the boards currently shipping.  I have an SB Live, and quite possibly have
> some divx movies with ac3 sound (haven't checked yet).  I'm considering this
> board, and it would be nice to have the digital out preferably on-board, or
> the sblive.

Mini Review of the board.

It's a great board with some fairly annoying warts. First, it will not,
under any circumstances, boot with ECC ram. I had two sticks of PC2100 ECC
and when fired up, the board just beeps at you. And, of course, it beeps at
you in a way that's completely undocumented. I was ready to RMA the board
back to newegg, when a friend mentioned to check the Phoenix BIOS page,
where an obscure line on one of the pages made me think RAM. One non ECC
stick of PC2100 later, I had a machine booting.

Sort Of.

This board comes out of the box set to 200MHz memory clock for DDR400. It
was highly unstable, as you can imagine, and had several attempts at
setting memory timings right, the problem was, if the memory timings were
wrong, you didn't even get video to set BIOS. I had to reset the bios
jumper several times.

As to your question, regarding SPDIF, my board came with no SPDIF port
adapter. I wasn't worried, since, I had no immediate plans for it. But when
I went to try to locate the port dongle for sale, I couldn't find it. I
read the reviews on newegg, and sure enough, the place on the motherboard
for the SPDIF header is just blank traces, no pins.

Also the motherboard power connector sits in between the CPU and the port
riser, this puts the cable in a location which I'd think would obstruct
airflow.

On the upside, the board seems very stable now that it's configured
correctly. I love having everything on board. I've currently got it
set up diskless, netbooting off my backend machine. I have yet to hook it
up to a TV, since I'm waiting until everything is working, which should be
Saturday.

So, overall, I recommend this board highly, though I'd caution you to not
expect SPDIF and to be willing to play with memory settings.

_______________
Chris Thompson