ZOTAC GF9300-A-E Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

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This motherboard is truly excellent for the money, the onboard 9300 is not the most highest performing card out there, with Windows 7 64, 8gb RAM and the onboard 9300 utilizing 512mb ram i was capable to get a score of 1850 points on 3Dmark06 clearly out performing my old AGP machine. You really can not go incorrect with this acquire, all the parts incorporated are of the highest good quality, CPU installation is a snap, and functionality is properly above average. I would have no dilemma acquiring Zotac once again, infact im waiting on the Zotac 9800 GT from UPS any day. none DO IT!

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Almost everything logically placed on the boards real estate, all the capabilities I need to have. plenty of room for add ons. Vista Encounter checks out nice up to 5.9. Pegless processor socket enables for smooth and simple placement. Corsair 8 Gig went in smoooth. Sata Slots easy, Mobo bias was simple to load and understand, Vista read almost everything fine, 1st load. ( nothing at all legacy ). Beware of Case standoffs, you need to have nylon spacers or plastic standoffs or else the Mobo will short. No other so far. Everythings operating quiet, Vista Load was flawless, Incorporated drivers simple to access from CD. Manage Panel Device Drivers really logical and straightforward to follow. Extremely Good !!!

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Simple to put with each other and extremely fantastic feature set for the value, especially the video output connectivity, the support for six SATA, the huge number of USBs and the Firewire. Well laid out internal connectors supplying effortless expansion. I'm utilizing with Q9550 and 8GB. I like the fan cooling on the 9300 chipset as this has a reputation for running hot with passive cooling and the fan on mine is incredibly quiet. Only four of the USBs brought out on backplate. I have place a 4 port expansion plate to pick up on motherboard headers. So now have 8 at the back, two at the front spare. Supplied CD drivers had been not Windows 7 64bit compliant but not seriously an issue as it always best to check on manufacturer's website for newest anyway and they have been offered there.

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Excellent assortment of connections. Bought this to replace a motherboard I gave to a client in an emergency. HDMI audio is scratchy/distorted. I at present have an antec 500W energy provide, 1 sata challenging drive, 1 sata dvd burner, two sticks of micron memory and a quad core cpu installed. HDMI out is connected to a Magnavox Tv HDMI port ྺ" LCD) and the audio is scratchy/poor sounding. The video is ok, truly seemed to look better coming out of the DVI port. The only explanation I purchased this board was for the HDMI out and the generous assortment of connections. I had no difficulties with audio just before this on any of my gear. I'll try a better shielded hdmi cable next and a diverse Television. I've currently attempted a lot of bios settings to see if it would affect the audio quality. I tried tweaking Windows XP settings and disabling the realtek audio (hdmi is coming from an nvidia chip). Nothing worked.

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More than the years I have constructed a lot of pc and employed a number of motherboard. Day two of New Machine tells me. This is a single of the COOLESTMOTHER BOARDS I have ever done not just one of the Cheapest. Take a closer look at ZOTAC that I assure will be significantly greater recognized in the Future.Mine was NOT but they ALL make D.O.A boards BUT they are not constantly an unbelievable bargain like this board apparently is. Think Me I Know.THE Finish Absolutly None I Enjoy This Freaking Board

Comment:
-Seems like a sturdy board with good elements-Working nicely so far as a mobo for my HTPC. Quick boot up with Intel E8200 CPU.-Has not verified to be the source of any crashes or reboots however-Is offering HD video and five.1 DD & DTS audio through HDMI by way of a receiver-Excellent number of SATA and USB ports/headers. -Not certain what the deal was, but Windows setup was Incredibly slow with this motherboard. Tried Win 7 64 bit and Windows XP Pro 64 bit and each were so slow to get began I assumed the approach was hanging and kept rebooting to attempt once again. If you encounter this, just stroll away for 10-15 minutes and setup course of action need to get began and/or resume to the next stage. Motherboard had most current firmware, as well. -nMEDIAPC 1000B HTPC Case-4GB Corsair XMS2 RAM-Intel E8200 two.6Ghz CPU-HDMI out to Yamaha receiver capable of HD audio processing-If you are going to use this for an HTPC and making use of a HDTV as opposed to a Computer monitor, make sure to install the nVidia display drivers so you can adjust the image as your desktop may possibly overscan your Tv's borders till you make adjustments.-XBMC and Windows Media Center operating fine, but make certain you set up the latest HDMI audio drivers from Zotac if you program to use HDMI for a/v out. XBMC seemed to play five.1 audio just fine suitable away, but Media Center essential additional tweaking in Windows audio setup to output 5.1 audio by way of HDMI properly.

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Modest type aspect. Zotac has created a strong concentrate on the mini-ITX format that I appreciate. Board is DOA, just like an additional poster. Onboard LEDS show A0; nowhere is this explained. A when ago, I put 4 Zotac-primarily based ITX technique out on the floor. A year later, within a three-month period, all have failed. This screams that Zotac is cutting corner on high quality huge time. Don't acquire Zotac if you want a extended-lasting program. (Honestly, occasionally it matters, occasionally it doesn't. If you upgrade typically, it doesn't.)

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Just got this board yesterday as a replacement for my evga 680i that died on me a week ago. Because the computer was old I did not want to get a super expensive board, and I also want this board for an HTPC when I choose to develop a new workstation. So far its been good, installed every little thing and the board posted right away. Recognized my raid from the old MOBO which was a plus as I didnt loose something or had to reinstall windows... Have a 1950xt but I will prob not set up it due to the fact the onboard video will be fine for what I want to do. The instruction manual is fine as opposed to some are saying, I did not use it at all but I just looked through it and its just fine if you have some understanding on how to construct computers. Nevertheless have not place all my 8gb of ram in it and have not tweaked something on the bios but will do that quickly. I believed obtaining a cheap board was a terrible notion in the initial location but decided, let me try it out and zotac rocked it! Absolutely nothing so far but will update as I see fit. New egg rocked it as generally... Super rapidly shipping, properly packed... Been a new egg consumer for 6 years and they have rocked it as always!

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1. Onboard HDMI and blu-ray decoding and HDMI audio2. Good cost for the functionsthree. Worked out of for the box with Windows 74. Excellent for XBMC Odd selection to only present a coaxial digital audio output and no optical. I was concerned about some of the wake-on-usb troubles reported by other overview, but I carry out a complete energy on/off by means of the remote that came with my Moneual MonCaso 312B case, so I'm fine with that.

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*It seemed to have everything one particular would commonly want from a micro ATX 775 board. Terrible practical experience. Bios had 2.7 V old battery rather of three. V. English is so bad it isn't funny--"Tiger temperature" rather of "Target temperature" appropriate in the BIOS selection and other horrible English blunders at boot up screen. It took a couble minutes for the board to detect video and get the video on the show screen...imagine what a individual can go by means of thinking they've got a bad board and placing the complete thing on RMA tracks but I got although that but problems continued. It's a quagmire. Spare your self hair pulling and get a board from an established massive player manufacturer who have perfected their mother board and BIOS implementation. Don't say you haven't been warned.

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Board runs fine immediately after I ultimately got Windows XP installed. Decode was ᝺% for h.264 content material recorded on a Hauppauge HDPVR and ង% for MPEG2 OTA recordings making use of an E5200. The BIOS ignores the boot order you set in the BIOS. I tried each and every combination. I even set ALL Three boot devices to the CD-ROM and it would go directly to the HD as an alternative. It took a couple of days to realize that pressing ESC throughout post would bring up the actual boot menu. I could not boot from the DVD drive AT ALL till I figured this one particular out. You can see the message if you disable all the splash screens and enable the extended technique check. That way, it stays on the post screen extended sufficient to see the prompt to press ESC. Scroll down and choose the CD-ROM. I study that this exact same menu comes up with F12 on the Gigabyte board. None

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None. DOA. Grrrr....

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None 1000 characters is not sufficient. Can't aid with the constant crashing. Debug screen is useless immediately after it posts. MIR, 6 months later, nevertheless nothing. Open a help ticket, they close it with no fixing the concern. They inform me they are waiting on me, when I sent the final e-mail with my findings they asked for. So no help for you. worts. buyer. service. EVER. I wish I could get my funds back. Appears like I will be throwing away 贘 MB that the lifetime warranty does not cover. Manufacturer Response:Please contact our tech help group at 1-877-599-6822. You can also do RMA via newegg. For rebate challenge, please e mail rebate@zotacusa.com

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Has a at present somewhat rare mixture of integrated NVIDIA 9300 graphics, integrated firewire, the 775 socket, and x16 PCI-Express slot. The board runs my DVR (mythtv) and drives my bigscreen Tv in 1080p. Runs linux nicely. The box shipped with the wrong rear cutout for the case. The board has the VGA on best of the DVI connector, but the cutout had holes for the opposite arrangement. Zotac's client service knew about this and a call was enough to get the appropriate cutout shipped, but I nonetheless required to take the Pc apart once much more. There is a quirk with the boot setup. No matter what the BIOS has as boot order, the board will NOT boot from a CD as extended as there is a single disk with a valid MBR connected to the boot-capable Sata 1...four. The only way to get a CD booted (and still be able to access a disk) was to move the disk to Sata connector 5 or six. The manual is not extremely beneficial (example from the "CPU features" section in th BIOS: "Limit CPUID MaxVal" -- "Use this selection to allow or disable the function of Limiting CPUID MaxVal). Then once again, except for some mystery settings, the BIOS is pretty simple, and severe overclockers will most likely keep clear of this board anyway. The board comes with a bracket for the IEC11394/firewire, but that has only a single connector. The board has two firewire headers. I would have liked to have a bracket with 2 connectors, a single six-pin and a single 4-pin. I picked the board for the mixture of on-board peripherals and graphics that I described above. I added a low-energy E2200 CPU and it runs extremely quiet. Great board for an entertainment Pc.

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Great for 1080p HTPC when it worked given in constructed-in GeForce 9300. Comparatively little. Has HDMI and VGA output. Plenty of internal SATA connections for expansion. I had this MB for about 5 months ahead of I began having challenges. In these 1st five months it worked nicely. In the past handful of weeks it crashes each time I start it up. It posts but cannot make it to the Windows screen. I have attempted various RAM, CPU and PSU with no improvement. Finally I known as Zotac.The only reason that I am giving this two eggs instead of 1 is simply because the Zotac client service particular person was particularly beneficial. Within 5 minutes he recognized that this have to be one more (as it seems from the multitude of negative boards on Newegg evaluations) faulty motherboard. Would I advise it or Zotac? In all probability not. five out of six months is not excellent adequate for me. Now I have to go through the complete RMA process.

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I haven't attempted to tweek it but, but immediately after I installed the ZOTAC ZT-85TEK2P-FSL GeForce 8500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready Video Card , the eye candy began. The windows practical experience rating was 4.six with just the onboard graphics, and after it jump to 5.4 which by the way was the lowest value on this method. But even so it performs nearly as fantastic as my 9800GTX on my other technique for โ.00 more affordable than the 9800GTX alone. none I really like Nvidia products!

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I purchased this motherboard to design about a HTPC to mostly playback Blu Ray motion pictures. Most know that HD content material can be a struggle for some PCs particularly ones where you ask them to use the onboard video (IGP). This one delivers. I'm using an E8400 Core2Duo processor (no overclocking) with 4 gigs of A-data ram. It plays Blu Ray and averages involving 10 - 15% CPU utilization on one of the cores throughout playback! That is saying a lot for onboard graphics. So far so excellent. Be aware that by default the BIOS for this motherboard makes use of IDE and not AHCI. If you do not enable AHCI the 5th and 6th SATA input on the motherboard will not be enabled. Unfortunately, I found this out the difficult way and thought a difficult drive was undesirable when it wasn't. Also, this motherboard came with the wrong I/O panel. It reversed where DVI and VGA are supposed to be. I wrote Zotac an e-mail and they had been aware of the challenge and sent me the correct I/O panel but it will be a bit of a pain obtaining to break down the Computer again after it arrives to install it. I was able to drill holes in the one they did send and it is working OK.

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Straightforward setup, booted right up, fantastic on board gpu, reads each and every factor perfectly, performs good with my parts just a incorrect rear cut out but that isn't adequate to make a 4 egg the incorrect rear reduce out appears to be a pretty common problem, the labels on the motherboard for pins for power switch was seriously nicethe gpu is decent for gaming but can only give a fantastic efficiency when I play elder scrolls four on medium graphics excellentnice on board sound cardperforms wonderful with 2x1 gig patriot ddr2 800 mhz, segate barracuda 3g sata, Q6600 2.four ghz quad core intel cpu

Comment:
This board set appropriate up with no difficulties whatsoever. It is extremely quiet, I have to place my ear close to it to hear it. It seems to be significantly much better quality than the Gigabyte board I purchased 5 years ago which was leading of the line at the time, and it is a quarter the size. Plus it is a tiny faster with the core duo that I bought for it than the Gigabyte is, so I guess you only get a couple years out of computer system gear just before obsolesence so you could as properly not spend a fortune for 1 that functions effectively. There's something funky with the usb connections. I use xp and it doesn't look to manage possessing the plugs removed and plugged into other ports and this is following appropriate drive xp drive removal procedures. Also, the front sound speaker only performs through 1 speaker at a time. Now I never use the front speaker jack, so I don't actually mind, and it may be the fault of the case header and not the mobo. I have never assembled a computer ahead of so I'm not really clear why there are professionals who assembled this board and had it blow up on them or spew smoke, mainly because for me it was not brain surgery. If you want a tiny board this is worth your consideration.

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The board worked for just about one particular month and was great for games, colour and clarity added to Halo 1 for example, Operating Vista fine and a lot more quickly than pentium class laptop. Error with board previous New Eggs a single month warranty. Shuts down just about right away. Had to submit for RMA to the MFG. Possibly the New Egg suggested Gigabyte board that is high rated a better selection stability smart regardless of possessing to acquire a separate video card ? So far 2 weeks wait with the MFG and this technique has been down or spotty since Jan 1 so the delays are not exciting. Glad that Zotac MFG supplies help though. New Egg must look at a technique build section of their web site for people who have built entire systems and have had them up and running for one particular year reliably or a lot more. ( even 6 months ). Requires the mystery out of no matter if your technique that you are excited to use will let you down or not. When it does it becomes hard to give it five eggs thats for confident. We like flexibility in purchassing but also have no concept about stability when we purchasse so info on that will assist.

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None. Zero. Zilch. This product is total and total garbage. The organization and internet site are just as negative. Does POST. There's a two-digit LED on the motherboard which is nice but nowhere on the website or the manual does it inform you what error code C1 is.The site is fully brain dead. In order to access anything or download you very first need to register. So I register employing my throw-away Gmail account. I then 'activate' making use of the e mail they sent me and I nonetheless can't login. It keeps telling me that this isn't a valid account. Hello???? I just freakin registered a couple of minutes ago. I click the 'lost my password' link and it tells me there's no such account. I go back to my e mail and click the 'activation link' they sent me. Now it fails telling me the link is no longer valid.So I go and register again. Fill out the form, click 'Submit' and it fails. It tells me an account with this email address currently exists. So I go back to the login page and tell it to send me my password and now it tells me there's no such password in their system. My NewEgg purchases show how a lot computer system equipment I acquire each and every year. And it's a LOT. I have never ever been so disappointed by a solution and business as I have with this one.I've constructed at least eight-10 computer systems more than the years and Under no circumstances had a dilemma. This motherboard appears nice and I really wanted to use it.However it is Complete GARBAGE that won't post, won't boot and although the LED display on the mobo is great idea... it is *completely stupid* not to have a table of what the various error codes in fact are.If they can't figure out anything as straightforward as listing the error codes then I have no faith in this corporation. This was my initial Zotac item and it will absolutely be my last.

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Constructed in Nvidia 9300 graphics, with HDMI, DVI and VGA. Low overall expense for this form of board (especially with recent rebate). Great match for revamping my four year old MythTV program. I have it up and running with MythBuntu for a week working with HDMI for video and audio without having any significant issues. No display port has been talked about, but for my application, HDMI, DVI and VGA are more than adequate. Also, I did run into the situation that other individuals had talked about concerning the strange concerns detecting boot devices. Mine would not see the principal PATA harddrive, but it would it see my SATA drive that I had intended to use as storage only. I reset the strategy and just utilised the SATA as I did not have time to figure out this situation. I also see a strange horizontal waviness in prime 1Ǚ of the display when playing back with VDPAU. It only occurs with motion in the frame and is only slightly annoying. I am hoping this is only a drive issue that will rectify itself. The board is additional than adequate to playback devoid of VDPAU with a E5200 and 2GB of RAM, but VDPAU is nice to offload to let processor to do commercial marking and transcoding. Again, an general fantastic technique for a combined MythTV backend and front finish. Newegg is nevertheless the very best overall spot to get hardware from. Keep up the good perform.

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It looks like an great MB on paper This is an update to my DOA assessment. Against my superior judgment, I RMA'd the MB for a replacement. The replacement arrived with the precise same error code as the initial one particular (A0). There is no documentation about what this error code suggests, but Zotac stated to return it. I will be asking NewEgg for a refund this time, which wouldn't be so poor if I didn't have to spend shipping charges just about every time.

Comment:
Good board and loading vista 32bit is smooth. Need to have to modify the bios setting to boot from blu-ray drive. Over-all functionality is also pretty good. 1080ቴP works fine for BD & HD titles. Some possibilities in bios for more than-clocking. Connector plate for chassis is wrong a single. I had to reduce the plate and remove DVI connector screws for DVI connector to go in. Built high quality is not excellent. I really feel this is just like low-cost board.Motherboard screws are missing. If not missing or incorrect parts, I would price this board 4 stars.

Comment:
Works excellent as soon as I got a functional one particular and located the drivers. 1st 1 was DOA and sent back for RMA - second a single was delivered to neighbors garage. Ultimately tracked it down, built the technique and was ready to load the drivers but the Zotac CD integrated in the box was so warped it wouldn't read. Went to the Zotac web web site to download the files and the links had been are all broken. Lastly identified the required drivers at the nVidia and Realtek internet sites. Geez - this build was jinx'd. In the finish, all is effectively...