[mythtv-users] thoughts about Chaintech 7NIF2-SUMMIT mobo

[Shawn Edwards]

I have one of these and I'm using it for my myth frontend at the moment.

Good news: The video is really nice.  The NVIDIA drivers do their job 
nicely.  Get the latest NVIDIA X drivers or you'll get bizzare artifacts.

Bad news: The net drivers from NVIDIA are broken or this board is 
broken.  Not sure which.  The sound is not fully supported, as it only 
allows for 48KHz audio under Linux.  Not a big deal unless you want to 
play audio that was encoded at 44.1KHz, like most ogg or MP3's are.  
They sound about a minor third too high in pitch.

And, since it's an Athlon board, the cpu is HOT.  If it's running for 
more than a half an hour or so doing playback (about 16% CPU load on a 
1GHz Athlon), the side of the case by the power supply gets so hot that 
I can't touch it bare handed.  I'm surprised I haven't let the magic 
smoke out yet.  This is in a uATX case with no significant extra stuff 
(ethernet card and sound card, no capture devices or such).  I'm going 
to try underclocking the chip if the board will let me, but if that 
doesn't work, I'm thinking of putting it into a full ATX case and giving 
it to my wife to run windows.  Hopefully the extra space will allow for 
some more air flow.  I'm assuming that the windows drivers are better 
supported by Chaintech than are the Linux drivers, so that will be this 
board's future.

For the cost of this board and a chip you should be able to get an EPIA 
M9000 board, which should be sufficient as a frontend and is reported to 
have nice (enough) driver support.

Hope this helps.  If anyone has contrary experience to mine, I'd love to 
hear about it.

Good luck.

-Shawn

Joe Byrne wrote:

>I'm interested in opinions about whether the Chaintech 7NIF2-Summit
>motherboard would make a good platform.  I searched the archive on 7NIF2 and
>nothing came up.  It's a microATX Nforce2 motherboard (GeForce4-MX-class
>graphics) with TV out.  It also has a Cmedia 9738 4-channel audio chip.
>Ideally I'd like to obviate the need for an add-in graphics and audio card.
>Also, I like the idea of maximizing airflow through the case by minimizing
>add-in cards.  Newegg has the board for about $100, vs about $75 for an Asus
>mATX board.
>
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