Hi everyone,
This is not a support question, rather a support answer.
I struggled with the M3N78-EM under Vista and XP for quite a while and have seen many others struggling with the boards as well.
The main issue was performance of TV and Video playback which was extremely glitchy as though the machine was very underpowered and could not cope with the demand (dropping frames, audio sync issues, etc...). I got it to the point where the MPC-HC codec for Videos was great (because it offloaded all mpeg4/divx/x264 traffic off to the video card), but found that TV was still poor performing. After finding out others have had this problem (especially with Media Portal), there's an easy work around.
The main issue is that Cool 'n' Quiet is implemented poorly on this board (probably driver issue)and when it's on video's and TV playback runs very poorly (and video too if not off loaded to GPU). So, the trick is to either turn it off in the bios (it was on by default on my M3N78-EM) or turn it off in windows:
To Turn off in XP: change power setting to anything other then 'minimal power'
To Turn off in Vista: in the advanced power settings, change the minimal CPU to 100% (making sure the Max is on 100% as well).
After discovering this, I found the following corroberating info:
AnandTech: The IGP Chronicles Part 2: AMD 780G vs. Intel G45 vs. NVIDIA GeForce 8200
Anyway, I ended up using RC4 + XP worked perfectly (with Cool 'n' quiet off). I still had issues with Media Portal in Vista which I'll save for another days post.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers
This is not a support question, rather a support answer.
I struggled with the M3N78-EM under Vista and XP for quite a while and have seen many others struggling with the boards as well.
The main issue was performance of TV and Video playback which was extremely glitchy as though the machine was very underpowered and could not cope with the demand (dropping frames, audio sync issues, etc...). I got it to the point where the MPC-HC codec for Videos was great (because it offloaded all mpeg4/divx/x264 traffic off to the video card), but found that TV was still poor performing. After finding out others have had this problem (especially with Media Portal), there's an easy work around.
The main issue is that Cool 'n' Quiet is implemented poorly on this board (probably driver issue)and when it's on video's and TV playback runs very poorly (and video too if not off loaded to GPU). So, the trick is to either turn it off in the bios (it was on by default on my M3N78-EM) or turn it off in windows:
To Turn off in XP: change power setting to anything other then 'minimal power'
To Turn off in Vista: in the advanced power settings, change the minimal CPU to 100% (making sure the Max is on 100% as well).
After discovering this, I found the following corroberating info:
AnandTech: The IGP Chronicles Part 2: AMD 780G vs. Intel G45 vs. NVIDIA GeForce 8200
Anyway, I ended up using RC4 + XP worked perfectly (with Cool 'n' quiet off). I still had issues with Media Portal in Vista which I'll save for another days post.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers