I busted my old piece of poo ATI 9550SE GPU. Now that was a crappy GPU. The screen would constantly flicker and jump around and do other weird stuff. That could also have been due to buggy Linux drivers, but either way it’s still a poor performance from ATI. Granted it was the cheapest GPU I could find some years ago, but still, it shouldn’t have been that bad. I was happy it was gone, good excuse to upgrade my machine!
Buying a new APG graphics card would have been kind of stupid,I’d just have wasted a lot of money on a card that I could not use with any decent motherboard later. So what the hell, lets buy a new motherboard. Oh wait, my old AMD processor will need a socket 754 motherboard. No way, I’m not going to buy a new ancient system. Wait another sec, my memory won’t be compatible either… It’s not easy to upgrade a system that is friggin three years old! The situation would be slightly better had I three years ago invested in a socket 939, but only slightly I guess.
Anyway, I decided to go for a budget motherboard with an integrated GPU. I chose the Asus M2N-MX, only 58€ @ verkosta.fi, which fared well in hintaseuranta, and they had it in stock. Newegg reviews for this board are spot on – it’s good value for your money, it comes with everything you need, but it’s got some minor problems, such as:
- Very confusing labeling for DIMM slots, but OK if you read the manual carefully.
- No locking clip for the heat sink’s retention bracket lock to clip into – but IMHO who needs that anyway? The heat sink will stay on just fine without it.
- “No mounting points near where the power cable and PATA cable plugs into the motherboard. Plugging and un-plugging those into the board causes it to flex more than I am comfortable with.” – nc3d – I could not agree more, plugging in the power and PATA cables is pretty scary with this one.
I found a couple of additional problems:
There’s no PC-speaker on the mobo! How will I be able to play Space Invaders?!?
There was a really ugly white scratch on my southbridge heat sink. Overall the product does not look very polished…
Some more pics:
If you need more connectors than this, buy another motherboard. With the M2N-MX you get no DVI, IEEE 1394, S/PDIF… just the basics. <sarcasm>Serial port is there, which is all I need</sarcasm>.
The accessories are pretty basic too, nothing fancy, just the absolute necessities. There was a case sticker, which was nice 
Here’s my AMD 64 X2 3800+ processor, not the fastest thing on the planet, but a great budget product. Got it for 66€ from Mikromaja, apparently the cheapest in Finland. Also bought some cheap memory from verkkokauppa.com. Here’s my updated machine:
Pretty leds all-over the case… Notice how the micro-ATX board is just ridiculously small for my huge case.
Everything works just fine for me with the Asus M2N-MX. Installing Ubuntu 7.04 was a breeze, although there were some problems with X settings after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but not a big deal. More on that later, if I bother…
I would love to hear more about this project. I have been planning on using this mobo myself on a low budget Ubuntu-box but haven’t had the courage to buy the mb since there are several posts around reporting problems with it. But apparently you have networking and sounds working all-right? What kind of problems did you have with the graphics drivers? And have you tried enabling 3D desktop effects?
Hi! I would recommend this mobo for Ubuntu 7.04, it does work, but there are a few minor things. If you have any Linux experience you should have no problems.
The most noticeable thing is a very high pitch noise in the left channel from the sound card. Really annoying, and it sounds like the whole thing is definitely busted
That was easily fixed though, I followed this advice: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=73058#73058
That solved the problem for me too and the sound is now crystal clear
I used Ubuntu’s restricted drivers manager (just one click from the menu!) to install Nvidia drivers and they worked just great. The only problem I had was that I was stuck with 800×600 resolution (but that always happens!) and couldn’t change the resolution with nvidia-settings, so in order to fix that I had to tweak xorg.conf by hand – not a problem if you have done that before. That could have been just because my monitor wasn’t properly detected, or just my usual bad luck. The opensource nv drivers worked straight out of the box, but obviously you get no 3d rendering with that. I have Beryl installed and it’s pretty smooth! Some of Beryl’s 3d effects are wee bit too slow, but most of them work great and look really good… It’s really easy to disable some of the unnecessary effects. OpenArena, SecondLife and Planet Penguin Racer all work, but obviously not at maximum resolution. The Nvidia MCP61 ethernet controller “just works”. So I’m a happy camper
In a nutshell – If you want 3d rendering and sound working you will have to edit one or two files. Not a big deal if you have some experience, but if you’re a noob, get another motherboard.
Hope that helps!
Thanks, that does help. I have encountered these same problems on various laptops, so nothing new there.
Did you try S/PDIF output? I have the same board (using Windows XP though), but I only get 32 kHz sampling rate on the S/PDIF output. I am currently trying to get ASUS support to help me, at least confirm that this board SHOULD support higher rates, but no luck so far. So if I could get it confirmed elsewhere, I would know that it is my particular board that is defective. (Otherwise, it would be those darn drivers)
Hi Johan, sorry I can’t help you, I don’t have the S/PDIF module so I haven’t been able to try it.
Does anyone else experience crackling and problems with sound especially when playing games in windows XP. I get crackling noises even when normal windows sounds play. I find that if I uninstall the SoundMAX drivers the problem is less noticeable in windows, but still there in games.
With windows Vista the problem is less noticable and the windows sounds don’t have problems playing.
I have the latest drivers for both the chipset, sound, and graphics, I also have the latest autopatcher updates for windows.
Anybody find a resolution to this problem?
Wow! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a totally different subject but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Wonderful choice of colors!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az2nPbd-bP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcbAFWhfoNQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhelCeMPI-w