Reviews for Asus M2A-VM Desktop Motherboard - AMD 690G Chipset - Socket AM2 PGA-940

Nice motherboard, but has some bugs

Strengths: Cheap On-board DVI, sound, network. Voltage control and some overclocking options

Weakness: Cool'n Quiet doesn't work properly (as of 06/01 bios).

I made a lot of research on 690g motherboards and finally decided on this one. You can adjust cpu, memory, northbridge voltages (including undervolting the CPU to 0.8V). You can also adjust CPU FSB (200 to 400) and memory speeds (DDR400 to DDR800). No memory timing adjustments are possible.

The only thing that bugs me about this board is that Cool'n Quiet does not work properly. Multiplier can be changed properly, however, voltage stays the same (as the bios-set value). I tried AMD's own drivers, crystalCPUID and RMClock, all with the same results. You need to use Asus probe or Asus Cool'n quiet utility to get the correct voltage, since CPU-Z reports incorrect voltages.

One of my favorite applications speedfan also does not work, however q-fan works quite well.

It's very stable so far, I've seen no blue screens at all when running XP.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Great for overclocking

Strengths: This runs the 5000+ Black Edition processor with water cooling at a stable overclock of 3.3Ghz. The ability to run multiple monitors (with ATI cards only I believe) is a plus for multimedia applications.

Weakness: This board is mATX and only has 2 PCI slots (instead of 3) which makes its utility as a storage server less then ideal, but this is a give

Overview
The motherboard installed without incident and I had no problems at all with anything. This runs the 5000+ Black Edition processor with water cooling at a stable overclock of 3.3Ghz. The ability to run multiple monitors (with ATI cards only I believe) is a plus for multimedia applications.
Good
The onboard video is quite good, which allows this machine to be used primarely as a gaming computer with the added PCIe-16x slot then later on to be used as a server or multimedia box with the necessity to add any additional hardware (with the exception of a RAID card). The machine is very stable and works perfectly
The Bad
This board is mATX and only has 2 PCI slots (instead of 3) which makes its utility as a storage server less then ideal, but this is a given. The mothboard has no significant flaws to speak of and I highly recommend it.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Nice board, but very finicky about memory.

Strengths: great ati onboard graphics, good pricepoint, dvi, and asus reliability and feature richness.

Weakness: Very finicky about memory. Using Crucial ddr2 667, board took 3-4 tries to boot. After researching, I found that increasing memory voltage from 1.8 to 2.0 fixed this. (1.9 did not fix it.)

After increasing memory voltage, this board has started flawlessly every time. 2D Graphics are good, board seems plenty fast with athlon 64x2 4800. With bios AMD cool-n-quiet enabled, this is the quietest pc I have (using antec nsk 1300). I'm running Mandriva 2008 64bit linux on this, and it seems to work very well. Early on it seemed like USB flash drive data tranfers were occassionaly very slow. Updated to 1603 bios (very easy to do from a flash drive) and it seems to have been corrected. The ATI graphics are not as well supported in linux as Nvidia for 3D graphics, but it can be made to work. I only use the 2D and that looks great. Would probably get the M2N-VM vs. M2A-VM for linux if I were to do it again.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Great motherboard for the price

Strengths: Small, but great features. one of only a few MicroATX boards I have seen with 8 gigs of memory available

Weakness: only 1 IDE port and no firewire.

Installing this board was easy, instruction manual was very clear. No troubles with stability as is typical with ASUS. The limit on 1 IDE port is understandable since SATA is the new standard and there are 4 of these. Also has DVI and VGA ports for video, though I plan on expanding shortly, still works great. Supports digital audio on the front panel. I just wish it had Firewire.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Excellent MOBO

Strengths: DVI interface. 4 USB prots or more. 4 RAM slots. Onboard graphic card is good.

Weakness: The rear I/O panel is too thin. Only one IDE.

For the price, it is an excellent board. I am using windows XP, amd X2 4600+ and 4G RAM. The system runs very well. So far, no driver problem. I'd like to try this AMD 690G chipset again. It should provide a good support to AMD CPUs.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

ASUS M2A-VM Motherboard

Strengths: 4 DDR2 RAM slots, On-board DVI, gigabit LAN, high definition sound,overclocking bios utilities, ASUS reliability, ATI Radeon X1250 graphics, 4 SATA ports w/ RAID 0 and 1, ASUS Q-Fan

Weakness: Would not recommend dual channel, only one IDE channel

We considered a lot of other motherboards before finally choosing this one. One of the main reasons why we chose the ASUS M2A-VM is because it supports Socket AM2 Dual-Core. Another one of the reasons why we selected this motherboard was because it has ATI Radeon X1250 graphics that can go up to 256MB graphics ram, taking 128 from your ram. A big feature on this motherboard is the support for 8GB DDR2 ram. Each slot can take up to 2GB which will really come in handy if you are an intensive gamer, operator of multi-user environment, or use virtualization programs, such as VMware and Parallels

This motherboard is a great buy for the future too because it has drivers for Microsoft’s new Operating System, Windows Vista.

40% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

BIOS chip loses its mind

Strengths: Everything, until it loses the BIOS.

Weakness: BIOS lost after about 6 restarts on 2 different boards. First board with XP64, and the second with XP32. I didn't take any chances on the second board and immediately updated the BIOS upon arrival.

Built a goodly number of systems and support a fleet of laptops for my work, and this is the first time I have encountered such a faulty BIOS chip. AMD and Asus really dropped the ball on this one. I am returning it for a refund since I have obtained a board locally that appears to work without BIOS issues.

0% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

not banking on 3rd times a charm

Strengths: Fits perfect in cube cases

Weakness: not working

1st board worked until windows was installed then had a hard time posting or the video would just go off. 2nd board worked for 1 day and then would not post. Latest BIOS semas to make things worse.

Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Excellent motherboard

Strengths: Stable, great features, value

Weakness: none

This is a great motherboard with rock solid stability. Plenty of USB connections. Good on-board video, capable of HD playback. Also has pci express slot to add a video card if you like. Great performance and the chipset is very cool and uses very little power.

Highly recommended.

Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Pretty good, Inexpensive Board

Strengths: Decent Built in graphics Gigabit LAN

Weakness: Only one IDE connector

This is the 2nd of these boards I have installed and it installed without a hitch. 2GB pqi Dual channel DDR2 runs great. The BIOS was easily upgraded in Windows, although I did need to manually download the newest BIOS manually. I have had a few times that it does not recognize the boot drive (IDE) and I need to reboot until it does. (I am not sure it is the board.) It has always eventually booted into Windows on the 2nd or 3rd try.

The biggest negative is the single IDE connector. If neither the HD or the DVD are SATA, you will hurt the performance of the HD being on the same IDE connector as the DVD drive.

Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Asus M2A-VM

Testseek.com has collected 9 expert reviews for Asus M2A-VM and the average expert rating is 69 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

Read Full Review