cheap motherboard w/ integrated everything

[Jing Su]

> I tend to agree with this statement, however many ASUS "value" boards come
> with decent on-board AGP video and sound chips (such as the VIA chipset
> and associated video chip). But without a AGP slot these are somehow

I have an Asus with integrated network and sound, using VIA's chipset.

A couple of things of note... The network card, via_rhine chipset, is only
supported under 2.6 kernels.  AFAIK, there are no 2.4 drivers for them.
You should keep that in mind, depending on which distro/kernel you decide
to use.  This probably won't be a big problem since everyone is switching
to 2.6 for the default kernel.

A second thing of note... the VIA soundcard that's built in isn't fully
supported in Linux.  It has basic mixer functionality, but I don't have
any of the advanced surround, equalizer, etc features that the Windows
drivers offer.  Still, the sound card is supported and sounds decent.

A downside to the built-in audio seems to be the proximity to the CPU and
stuff.  Whenever the CPU is working hard, you can hear some interference
(in the form of buzzing noise) ever so faintly in the sound.  Noticable on
headphones, but not on speakers.  Otherwise if the CPU is idling, just
playing MP3's for example, the sound is very clear.

As an upside, the card comes with multiple PCM channels, which the Alsa
driver seems to recognize and multiplex effortlessly.  No need to run
stupid daemons like ESD or JACK.  Multiple requests to the PCM get
multiplexed in hardware.  I'm not sure if it's hardware or driver support,
but previous built-in sound-cards that I've seen didn't have this, so I
was pleasantly surprised.

Still, if you're an audiophile, I'd suggest getting a quality PCI
soundcard, provided there's Linux support for it.


-Jing
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml