Mini-review of Asus N4L-VM DH

[jamesavery22]

Nice old thread.
My board is still running 24/7. I never messed with trying to get 2GB working. I kept an eye on the Asus support forum thread, still looks like no one(at least those who report back) can get 2GB working even with all the new Bios updates. Sort of sad.

[Benito]

Hi James,

Do you mean to say you can't get 2 gigs of ram working on this board?
I'm running it with 2 x 1 gig of GEIL ddr2 pc5300 cl5 in dual channel.

Worked even without a bios update, straight out of the box.

regards

[Benito]

I've been in contact with someone from Cooljag, and he assured me that their Falcon Mini would fit on the N4L-VM DH as a cpu cooler. He himself has already installed Falcon Mini's on this mainboard, and said it only took some bending of the supplied clip.

If you want to buy large quantities, this adaption can be done in their Taiwan factory, but I guess most people will not need too many of them.

The only problem is that this product is now EOL, but if you contact Cooljag, they can still ship them straight out of Taiwan.

I have asked to send me over 2 pieces, not sure if they will go through all the trouble of sending me 2 pieces directly from the factory, but if you can find them anywhere (in stock at some dealer, or ebay), they should work fine.

I also tried the Noctua on this board, it's okay if your board lies flat in your case (htpc), but it's not safe when in a standing case, or when you move your pc a lot.

[Delta_42]

I'm using 2Gb on this board too, I don't think I flashed the bios from the original flash I did back when I got the board to get the T7200 working.

[jamesavery22]

Thanks for chiming in Benito,
I've never tried using 2GB on my board. All the people who have posted on Asus' community forum for this motherboard have tried and had problems though. If you guys know the stick info and bios info that you're using it'd be nice if you posted over there Im sure it would help the people over there. It doesnt get much traffic but Im sure a few people are watching it. Speaking of which support.asus.com is down...

Eh the forum is still up:
http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?bo ... uage=en-us

[frogfeet]

hello, just stumbled on this board. built an HTPC based on the N4L VM DH right after it came out in europe about 18 months ago. has been running like a champ ever since, nice and quiet in the living room. i just upgraded it this weekend to 2G of RAM and a PCIE video card (fanless ATI hd2600 xt). a few glitches after installing the ram (kingston value ram which i picked up in dubai, i didnt check to see it was vendor qualified, but i'm pretty sure it is, same stuff i took out, just 1G sticks instead of 512MB sticks). nothing major (overclocking error on boot, just went into bios, exited and it was fine). seems to be running ok, i hadn't realized there were issues with the 2G ram and the PCIE card. may update the bios, as i haven't done that in at least a year andi will install Vista soon once i'm sure it's stable (32 bit home premium, mainly for the media center capability). i was wondering about new drivers for vista. found a few on the asus site but not all (e.g. LAN driver; only xp dirvers available). figured either vista would have it already, or i'd just install the xp version. anyone run into issues with vista?

[Mikey]

Vista is picky about drivers, don't count on XP drivers working.

Suggest you try an install on a spare drive before converting your system if drivers aren't available.

[Benito]

Hi,

I'm running Vista Ultimate on the N4L-VM, works fine, even without bios update. All the drivers work fine and are installed automatically. Don't know about the Jmicron sata port, since I disabled that sob in the bios. And don't know about the onboard video, since I use a PCI-e card (currently a Quadro FX softmodded as a Geforce, lol, awaiting my HD3870 crossfire setup, though I'm not sure if I shouldn't wait for the HD3900. Anybody got any news on that?

And no, it is not a typing error, it is a Quadro FX softmodded as a Geforce with Rivatuner (which works fine in Vista, automatic updates for whichever card you want to 'virtualize') and not the other way around, as you might expect. Of course, for 3D rendering and Cads, I switch it to Quadro, or what did you expect.

[Edit: The standby/Away/Quickresume doesn't work properly, but MS specifies their Intel Quick Resume Driver ONLY works with XP Mediacenter, not with regular XP, and not with Vista. So this has nothing to do with the asus board, and if I remember correctly, this Quick Resume is a fable anyway, since it only disables video and sound]