Asus P5N7A-VM

[Hugo_bee]

woa

thanks

[savestheday]

Hi guys,

Does the HDMI out work? I understand it won't carry audio, but if it carries video to my HDTV without the need for SwitchResX (running 1366x768) I'd be very, very happy. Thanks in advance for this info!

[DiaboliK]

Hi guys,

Does the HDMI out work? I understand it won't carry audio, but if it carries video to my HDTV without the need for SwitchResX (running 1366x768) I'd be very, very happy. Thanks in advance for this info!

 

 

xD thats not HD at all, but yes HDMI Video works fine.

 

-D-

[savestheday]

xD thats not HD at all, but yes HDMI Video works fine.

 

-D-

 

yeah I know, it's a 1080i TV so it runs at that weird resolution. I wish I knew if HDMI still needed switchresx or if it recognized as a default resolution over HDMI. I was under the impression that when using a DVI->HDMI cable that you needed to set that custom res because your tv doesn't have a DVI profile.

[Hugo_bee]

i'l like to test that attachment

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t&p=1136145

 

it works for Zotac Geforce9300 chipset (is the same as p5n7a-vm)!!

 

and it works better..

without touching (delete or put) 0 (yes, the S/L/E is untouched)

no dsdt are required.. all is working fine

 

the 2 hardware are:

Asus P5N7a-Vm EVERYTHING OK EXCEPT USB LOW SPEED

Chip: Nforce i730 (fsb1333) / Jmicron / GPU nV9300 (Overclk +144%)

Aud: ALC1200 (maybe yes?!) / Eth: Ok / BT: External Sitecom

 

Zotac Geforce9300wifi EVERYTHING OK EXCEPT WIFI INT

Chip: Nforce i730 (fsb1333) / Jmicron / GPU nV9300 (Overclk +144%)

Aud: ALC662 (maybe yes?!) / Eth: Ok / WiFi (ko) / BT: External Sitecom

[alfred kwan]

I am very interested to get this board, but it seems the howto is using another Mac for installation.

Can anyone share about how to install leopard WITHOUT another Mac?

[anitanium]

I am very interested to get this board, but it seems the howto is using another Mac for installation.

Can anyone share about how to install leopard WITHOUT another Mac?

 

well, one could use a pre-existing package (like iPC or iDeneb) and it install it onto a partition.

then from that working install, install 10.5.6 retail onto another partition.

[shfaxx]

well, one could use a pre-existing package (like iPC or iDeneb) and it install it onto a partition.

then from that working install, install 10.5.6 retail onto another partition.

 

 

So installing with Boot132 and a retail DVD won't work? I've done this on a Gigabyte board and actually just bought this board but haven't put the hardware together yet.

 

 

 

tnx

[Cave Man]

So installing with Boot132 and a retail DVD won't work? I've done this on a Gigabyte board and actually just bought this board but haven't put the hardware together yet.

 

I used the Universal Installer with Chameleon to install 10.5.6 from a retail OS X DVD.

[Cave Man]

I'm having a couple of issues that I hope someone can help with. I'm not all that experienced at building computers (only two hackintoshes). My box with this board has a Q8200 quad-core processor and it is hovering around 55-60 C for the four cores while idling, but jump up to the mid-70s under load. My hard drives are ok, around 40 C nominal and around 50 C under load (e.g., Plex Blu-ray playback or H.264 transcoding with Eye TV or Handbrake 64-bit software). If I sleep the computer for a while the temps drop down to about 40 C for the processor and 30 C for the drives. When I cold boot or wake from sleep, the temps steadily go up, the processor fan and PS fan both come on and ramp up, becoming distractingly noisy (I'm using the stock fan for the cpu). Even if the computer idles it does this, such that within an hour or two of no load the fans become noisy. I would like to mitigate this noise and hope that someone can offer suggestions.

 

I did not apply additional heat sink compound to the cpu/sink when I built the computer. The standard wax that comes with the sink is what's on there. I did not install a third fan - I have room for an 80mm enclosure fan. So, my questions are:

 

1. Should I pull the processor and clean the wax off, then apply Arctic Silver 5?

2. Is there a better processor fan solution? My understanding is that the new Intel stock fans are pretty good. A new fan would have to fit into a small form factor enclosure (about 3 in high, maximum).

3. Will a third fan be helpful or might it compound the noise level? Is there such a thing as a silent fan (other than the movement of the air)?

4. Would moving to a Q8200s (65 watt) processor have a substantial impact on heat?

 

It would be nice to get the computer to go quiet without sleeping it. (I also have to restart my Eye TV Hybrid after sleep, otherwise it cannot detect the USB tuner.)

 

Thanks much.

[or_astroman]

Cave Man (I loved Captain Caveman back in the day btw)

 

What kind of case are you running? You mentioned it's a small form factor right? A lot of those are known for having poor ventilation or heat related issues.

 

There are a lot of people out there that swear by after market thermal compounds like Artic Silver or Tuniq. Give them a shot. They are fairly inexpensive ($5 - $10 or so). Do clean off the old compound before you apply the new stuff.

[Cave Man]

I have this In Win enclosure. Do you know of others that would be better suited? I'll definitely do the Arctic Silver 5. I've seen sites that claim it can reduce temps by 10 degrees (but they don't say if that's C or F). Is that possible? I'm also going to order an 80mm side fan that's supposedly near silent.

[DiaboliK]

I have this In Win enclosure. Do you know of others that would be better suited? I'll definitely do the Arctic Silver 5. I've seen sites that claim it can reduce temps by 10 degrees (but they don't say if that's C or F). Is that possible? I'm also going to order an 80mm side fan that's supposedly near silent.

 

 

the thing that needs the most cooling on this mobo is the northbridge ( the copper thing w/ the asus logo and the oval loop).

 

easiest mod to get better airflow to that is to take off that asus logo, all you have to do is use some leverage and pop that sucker off, its only held in by double sided tape.

 

once you got that off, get some airflow moving over it.

 

my cpu (xeon e3110) runs fanless but the nb is the only thing w/ air cooling in my case. (omaura tf5)

 

-D-

[Eastwind]

I am very interested to get this board, but it seems the howto is using another Mac for installation.

Can anyone share about how to install leopard WITHOUT another Mac?

 

I can't. But with Mac, this install was far easier than the Gigabyte board I tried earlier. Beg, borrow or steal a Mac for 20 minutes and you're good. This boards pretty easy to make a Hackintosh, no question.

[Cave Man]

the thing that needs the most cooling on this mobo is the northbridge ( the copper thing w/ the asus logo and the oval loop). easiest mod to get better airflow to that is to take off that asus logo, all you have to do is use some leverage and pop that sucker off, its only held in by double sided tape.

 

OK, thanks. I will do this in the next few day.

 

once you got that off, get some airflow moving over it.

 

I have a second 80mm fan coming in. Should it blow air into the enclosure or out of the enclosure?

[fcol313]

My box with this board has a Q8200 quad-core processor and it is hovering around 55-60 C for the four cores while idling, but jump up to the mid-70s under load.

I have a Q9400 that idles around 30C. I don't think it's ever gone above 45-50C when transcoding H.264 or using Prime 95. I have an Antec NSK2480 case, mini Scythe Ninja cooler (w/ Arctic 5), and only one (custom rigged, large, slow moving) fan blowing over the Asus heatsink (then through the CPU cooler and out the side of the case). Without the fan, the northbridge would hover around 70C under load but is sub 50C with my specially placed fan.

 

When I was building the PC back in Nov 08, I found this AVS discussion very helpful:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1079923

 

In any case, I remember a lot of people using the Intel stock cooler who got low temps, too. I don't know your case but just make sure you get good airflow moving in and then out of the case. If it's not balanced, you get pockets of hot air that can build up or cool air that never passes through the heatsink(s). My case came with baffles to help direct airflow over the heatsinks. Without the baffles, outside air just comes in and goes directly out an exit (never going over heatsink).

 

If I sleep the computer for a while the temps drop down to about 40 C for the processor and 30 C for the drives. When I cold boot or wake from sleep...

If I recall correctly, your installation process was basically identical to mine. How in the world did you get sleep to work? If you didn't do anything special, would you mind posting your BIOS version and settings? Thanks!

[Hugo_bee]

hy

i see that as wrote diabolik if I use smbiosresolver the system gos to KP asking for a HPET controller.. ok

but which way is the best.. my goal is to see in system profiler that mac use ddr2 at 800mhx and not 667. I thinked the only way is to use smbios-28 or -33 or -27 from anv or fassl.. but the boot change a lot! it give me errors about invidia.. and without nvkush I didn't see graphics. It's a newer information for me.. I don't know if (or not) the smbios driver (and serial, model etc..) can override the beautiful dsdt that can load os without disabler and without video injector!!

[Cave Man]

easiest mod to get better airflow to that is to take off that asus logo, all you have to do is use some leverage and pop that sucker off, its only held in by double sided tape.

 

Well, that knocked off about 7 C from my temps. Why the heck does Asus even put it there if it causes heat retention? I'll put a fan on it tomorrow after it arrives.

 

I have an Antec NSK2480 case...and only one (custom rigged, large, slow moving) fan blowing over the Asus heatsink...

 

So you have put a fan right over the northbridge. That's pretty cool (no pun intended). I checked out that case and it is very nice looking. It says in the specs that it comes with two 120mm fans - did you remove both and put one over your northbridge, or do you have three fans in there? Also, do you have a DVD drive in your case? If so, which one and what color is it? It seems like a black one would look out of place.

 

Without the fan, the northbridge would hover around 70C under load but is sub 50C with my specially placed fan.

 

I think this is the other part to my problem. I have a low profile case (4" high) and have another 80mm fan coming in tomorrow. I hope that it settles my system down. But right now, the noise is acceptable - it is much better than before.

 

When I was building the PC back in Nov 08, I found this AVS discussion very helpful:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1079923

 

Thanks for that link - it is very informative.

 

If I recall correctly, your installation process was basically identical to mine. How in the world did you get sleep to work? If you didn't do anything special, would you mind posting your BIOS version and settings? Thanks!

 

There are a couple weird things about sleep with my box. When the computer wakes (by tapping a key or set to wake in the Energy Saver pane), my other hackintosh (P5K-E) gets knocked off remote disk mounting and screen sharing (but my real mac and the P5N7A-VM hackintosh do not) even though internet works fine. I have to restart the P5K-E hackintosh to get sharing back. Is that weird, or what? I don't think I did anything different with my BIOS than what was posted by Ufdah - is there a particular screen or screens you'd like to know about? There are a lot of them. Also, I noticed there were a lot settings in one of the BIOS screens that dealt with waking from activities (e.g., ethernet) and those are all disabled. Has anyone tried modding those?

[Signal64]

I use Nexus LOW7000's to take care of the nb cooling on all of the 730i boards I have. No additional fan needed, large enough for decent air flow at a slow speed. But in the end if you run your board horizontal you just need a breeze on the nb.

 

http://signal64.osx86.me/p5n7avm/100_4223-1.jpg

http://signal64.osx86.me/p5n7avm/100_4217-1.jpg

 

http://www.nexustek.nl/NXS-LOW-7000_silent...-CPU-Cooler.htm

 

I think Thermalright or Thermaltake make one like it.

 

BTW - the thermal grease on the nb is actually "grease" and not a thermal pad or hard grey {censored} like you find on other boards. There isn't any gain in replacing it.

[fcol313]

So you have put a fan right over the northbridge. That's pretty cool (no pun intended). I checked out that case and it is very nice looking. It says in the specs that it comes with two 120mm fans - did you remove both and put one over your northbridge, or do you have three fans in there? Also, do you have a DVD drive in your case? If so, which one and what color is it? It seems like a black one would look out of place.

The fan is actually sitting at an angle on top of the empty PCI slots (ugly but works). As Signal64 mentioned, that ASUS heatsink needs some small amount of airflow when horizontal. So the fan draws in air from the back, blows over the ASUS heatsink, through the mini Scythe Ninja heatsink, and out the two side outlets (where the two 120mm were originally installed). I left one case fan in (but off) and the other is the one providing the cooling (set at low speed). My entertainment cabinet is really tight so I barely have any clearance on the sides (3/4 inch per side). The case fans were very quiet but I think the tight spacing created some back pressure, so I don't use them as intended.

 

I have a LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD GGC-H20L. It's black - I don't mind the look but it's hidden behind a black screen mesh (IR receiver is elsewhere).

 

I don't think I did anything different with my BIOS than what was posted by Ufdah - is there a particular screen or screens you'd like to know about? There are a lot of them. Also, I noticed there were a lot settings in one of the BIOS screens that dealt with waking from activities (e.g., ethernet) and those are all disabled. Has anyone tried modding those?

Which BIOS version are you running? Don't worry about the other settings - was just wondering if you did something different than the "standard" recommendations here. Sleep is very frustrating to me as I've tried every solution posted in this thread. I thought it was something with the DSDT and my Q9400 CPU (but your Q8200 is the same family so I guess I have a unique problem somewhere). I'm actually a total n00b to OSX86 so all talk about DSDT (such as Frodokenny's) is completely over my head.

[fcol313]

RE: Sleep issues - Well, a small miracle happened. Sleep is finally working. I trashed disabler.kext and restarted 5 times before attempting sleep - no success. So I started messing around with the BIOS again (and also tried wired keyboards vs wireless, unplugging IR receiver, unplugging the PS2 keyboard, etc etc). After I changed the BIOS-MCP7A Chipset Config-iGPU Frame Buffer Size to 256MB (from Ufdah's recommended 512MB), sleep started working. I'm not 100% sure the frame buffer size is what fixed it. It could have been the >10 restarts. Or perhaps just letting it go to sleep (set sleep after 1min) rather than forcing it to sleep via Apple menu.

 

I was trying to narrow down the the actual solution but accidentally hosed my boot drive. I forgot I was working off a secondary partition and went to clone it to the primary boot partition. But I kept getting some error in Super Duper so I restarted. Whoops - I forgot my primary boot partition was erased. So now I need to pull the drive and try to clone the good partition back to the boot partition (fortunately, I have a real Mac to do this). Hopefully, that will restore things (and sleep will continue to work).

[Cave Man]

RE: Sleep issues - Well, a small miracle happened. Sleep is finally working. I trashed disabler.kext and restarted 5 times before attempting sleep - no success. So I started messing around with the BIOS again (and also tried wired keyboards vs wireless, unplugging IR receiver, unplugging the PS2 keyboard, etc etc). After I changed the BIOS-MCP7A Chipset Config-iGPU Frame Buffer Size to 256MB (from Ufdah's recommended 512MB), sleep started working. I'm not 100% sure the frame buffer size is what fixed it.

 

Glad it's working for you. I have mine set to 256 mb as well - perhaps this is the solution. Do you have issues with any other computers on your network seeing this hackintosh after wake?

[fcol313]

Glad it's working for you. I have mine set to 256 mb as well - perhaps this is the solution. Do you have issues with any other computers on your network seeing this hackintosh after wake?

The clone worked so everything is running fine again. I just put it to sleep. When the OSx86 machine woke up, it immediately showed up in my other Mac's Finder sidebar. The Mac connected to a shared drive and screen sharing worked fine. I only use ethernet.

[Cave Man]

The clone worked so everything is running fine again. I just put it to sleep. When the OSx86 machine woke up, it immediately showed up in my other Mac's Finder sidebar. The Mac connected to a shared drive and screen sharing worked fine. I only use ethernet.

 

Sounds like you have the solution. Might be worth a note in one of the main posts here.

 

On another note, I rec'd my MacBook Pro IR board today and spliced it to a internal USB header, drilled a small hole in the front panel of my case and mounted the sensor right behind it. Nice to have my Harmony remote back for Plex.

[Hugo_bee]

ehy man!!

I return with a request.. ok.. I've a head of stone!!

I've published my recent good progress with the other mcp79 .. hte zotac.

I return because I have only usb keyb/mouse.. but in the other mobo I have good usb hi speed.

then.. searching and searching.. I got the developer apple apsl code of last IOUSBFamily and in the main cpp projet of USBEHCI i found that!

AppleUSBEHCI::AcquireOSOwnership(void)
{
UInt32			hccparams = USBToHostLong(_pEHCICapRegisters->HCCParams & kEHCIEECPMask);
UInt32			eecp;
UInt32			data;

USBLog(2, "Attempting to get EHCI Controller from BIOS");
eecp = (hccparams & kEHCIEECPMask) >> kEHCIEECPPhase;

// if there is no eecp register, then we can assume we have ownership
if (eecp < 0x40) 
	return kIOReturnSuccess;

data = _device->configRead32(eecp);

if ((data & 0xFF) == kEHCI_USBLEGSUP_ID)
{
	USBLog(2, "Found USBLEGSUP_ID - value %p - writing OSOwned", (void*)data);
	_device->configWrite32(eecp, data | kEHCI_USBLEGSUP_OSOwned);

	// wait for kEHCI_USBLEGSUP_BIOSOwned bit to clear
	for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++)
	{
		data = _device->configRead32(eecp);
		if ((data & kEHCI_USBLEGSUP_BIOSOwned) == 0)
			break;
		IOSleep(10);
	}
	if ((_device->configRead32(eecp) & kEHCI_USBLEGSUP_BIOSOwned) != 0) 
	{
		USBError(1, "[u][b]EHCI controller unable to take control from BIOS[/b][/u]");
		return kIOReturnNoResources;
	}
	else
	{
		USBLog(2, "acquireOSOwnership done - value %p", (void*)_device->configRead32(eecp));
	}
}
else
{
	// on the NEC controllers, the eecp contains a 0, so we assume we have ownership
	USBLog(2, "EHCI controller has wrong value in EECP register");
}
return kIOReturnSuccess;
}

 

ok.. also read there to comprehend if I can do something.. but I didn't fount eny define entry in last apple code.. so.. i'm not a programmer.. is there anyone who can put his brain into it??