[Review] ASUS T3-M3N8200 Barebone HTPC

[ghettro]

Review: Asus T3-M3N8200 Barebone

I have had my eye on these barebones for a while, for the uninitiated, the barebone exists somewhere between an off the shelf computer and a custom built, bring your own CPU, RAM and HDD and you have a computer. My need for budget Media Center PC attracted me to this barebone as well as the integrated NVidia GeForce 8200 with hardware video decode, small form factor, integrated/stealthed optical drive & USB/headphone jacks and the low power consumption.

The main specifications of the barebone are:

- AMD Socket AM2+ 2000/1600 MT/s
- Combined NB/SB: nVidia MCP78S
- 4 x DIMM Dual DDR2 1066/800/667 Support max. 8GB
- Integrated GeForce 8200 GPU DirectX10
- Gigabit ethernet
- HDMI output
- 8 Channel audio
- Integrated card reader
- 250w PFC PSU

Full specification can be found here:
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?mo...=2&l3=407&l4=0


Design

The custom motherboard layout is reminiscent of the bygone BTX layout with the CPU at the front of the case, memory slots in a front-rear orientation at the bottom & the expansion slots at the top. The PSU and hard drive bays swing out of the case to provide easy access once the cover is removed. This swinging part is restrained by two infuriatingly miniature countersunk screws which I have already lost one of... This could have been better designed with a proper latch system like the Powermac G4. Strangely the two front case feet are rubber and the rear two are pressed out of the bottom panel of the case.

Once it is sealed up the packaging is tight. According to the manual, video cards longer than 190mm will not fit in the single PCI-e X16 slot as they will hit the rear of the front panel PCB. There is another standard PCI slot and two blank covers above that, it looks large enough to fit another 3.5” hard disk if you were so inclined to make up some mounting system. The PCI slots are locked into place with a slider that I found slightly awkward, it would have been better if they had just left it with a conventional screw design. The PSU is a standard ATX size, and is rated at 250w with a 120mm fan.


The front panel features a piano black finished sliding panel design which hides the USB ports, headphone/mic jacks, firewire port, card reader and eject button for the stealthed optical drive bay at the top. The power button is located on the sliding panel and is lit by a multicolour LED. Blue coloured for power, purple for HDD R/W and it briefly changes to orange when it is powering down for S3 sleep. Like another ASUS board that I have, during sleep the power light will blink (blue) which I find irritating, particularly as there is no way to turn it off other than to S4 hibernate it. However overall the appearance of the unit is quite nice and minimal and is definitely one of the more attractive cases around in this form factor.



There are intakes on the front panel and a vent on the side panel, there are no internal fans; however there is space for a 80mm fan on the inside of the front panel. The PSU fan is relied on to do most of the exhaust duties through the plentiful rear vent.

Setup

I chose to use an Athlon x2 5200+ 65w CPU, 2x1gb Kingston DDR2 800mhz and a WD Caviar SE16 640gb hard disk in this setup. There are three SATA ports, and one IDE - the onboard SATA controller can also control AHCI/RAID. I installed Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate, initially I tried enabling AHCI mode in the BIOS which would cause a “disk read error” message once it tried to boot from the HDD. After a BIOS flash to the latest revision and a preinstall of the nVidia AHCI/RAID drivers at the Vista install prompt, I still had no luck. Plain SATA mode worked fine though, I was slightly disappointed as I like the ability to have hot pluggable SATA for large file transfers. Also I could not for the life of me get the card reader to work, it constantly showed up in device manager as an unknown device in the USB tree. Scouring ASUS’ support site gained nothing, pulling out the card reader revealed that it was a Realtek RTS111 which I found drivers for. Installing these drivers achieved nothing, other than changing it from unknown device to USB mass storage (albeit with a code 10 error & a yellow error triangle next to it). I have contacted ASUS technical support and am waiting on a reply.




Acoustics & Cooling

The case is very quiet with completely stock components, most of the noise at idle is from the spinning hard disk. With a 2.5” drive and/or soft mounting I’m sure this could be made quieter. The pressed metal feet at the rear did transfer some resonance into the surface it was sitting on but this could be quite easily fixed with rubber stick on bumpers. Otherwise, as there is an absence of case fans there is not much noise at all. The PSU is next to silent, although it's masked by the noise of the hard disk spinning.

Idle temperature stayed at around 32˚-36˚C for the CPU & GPU. Full load (H.264 video encoding) temps reached 50˚-55˚C. This is at roughly 25˚C ambient. There were no overheating or stability issues at all, despite the lack of any case fans.

One thing I did notice was that there was a fair amount of feedback noise in the audio, you could hear very slight blips from internal electrical interference. However this isn’t unusual for integrated audio chips, I guess it depends on your sensitivity to this. Watching a film you would not really notice this unless you muted it and the speakers were turned up loud.

There is also a silentpcreview.com article on a similar custom system based on the Intel 945 chipset here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Anitec_SilenT3_PC

Performance

Ok to be honest, I didn’t really look into overclocking all that much, there are some minor CPU frequency/multiplier adjustments and CPU/GPU & Memory voltage settings in the BIOS as well as the ASUS O.C. profiles which you can save. However the aim of my media center was to be quiet and cool running with HD video playback capacity. For nVidia 8200 benchmarks & comparisons have a look at Anandtechs here:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3430

I did some basic benchmarks with some HD video clips using Windows Media Player 11

Journey To The Centre Of The Earth - Blu-Ray rip MKV/H.264 1080p AC3HD Audio

With DirectX Video Acceleration enabled:
Average CPU load: 10%-15%
With FFDshow software decoding enabled:
Average CPU load: 70%-85%

In Bruges - MKV/H.264 720p AC3HD Audio

With DirectX Video Acceleration enabled:
Average CPU load: 10%-15%
With FFDshow software decoding enabled:
Average CPU load: 35%-65%

Subjectively, I found that the processor & GPU are well up to the task at hand. It was easily possible to be encoding video in the background whilst recording and watching HDTV in Vista media centre.

Final thoughts
The M3N8200 satisfied my requirements for a quiet, nice looking & small media centre. Build quality & design is generally good, the design allows for a good deal of compactness with some kind of upgradeability compared to slim form factor cases. I was disappointed by the non-functional card reader as well as not being able to get AHCI to work. It handles media centre duties very well, the feel is very snappy; it would also be a good mini-server if the limited disk bays are not an issue.

Overall I give it an 8 out of 10.

Thanks for reading!
Jonathan aka ghettro

[chip]

looks interesting - how much clearance was there around the CPU HSF? Is there space to use a larger aftermarket HSF?

[gazzamcgazza]

Very nice. Been thinking about one of these boxes for a while. Thanks for the review, and hope you get the reader sorted soon

[ghettro]

Originally Posted by chip

looks interesting - how much clearance was there around the CPU HSF? Is there space to use a larger aftermarket HSF?

Directly above 20-30mm the stock AMD HSF is the hard drive cage & PSU so there isn't much space vertically, although there is a bit of space around horizontally though. If you check out the link to silentpcreview in my review, they managed to fit an aftermarket cooler to it.

[chip]

Cheers

SPCR is an excellent site

[schplade]

What tv tuner are you using with it?

[Onyx]

Thanks for taking the time to write the review ghettro, having google'd the Intel based version, (I got a E2180 CPU spare) I'm surprised how cheap these barebones systems are nowadays!

[ghettro]

Thanks for the feedback guys

schplade:
I am using a Leadtek DTV1800H, it's only a cheaper one, but it is analog/digital. Never had any problems with it, and it works perfectly.

Onyx:
I had my eye on the intel ones as well because my gaming PC is intel based, but for the same price as the M3N8200, you could only get a G31 based one. There is a 945 version around for about $150 but from what I have read is that the motherboard for some reason has no ethernet built in, so they supply you with a separate 10/100 ethernet card which occupies the single PCI slot which I wanted for my TV tuner. I would have got this one + a discrete video card otherwise. The G31 version doesn't have this problem though.

[f1re]

Originally Posted by ghettro

There is a 945 version around for about $150 but from what I have read is that the motherboard for some reason has no ethernet built in, so they supply you with a separate 10/100 ethernet card which occupies the single PCI slot which I wanted for my TV tuner. I would have got this one + a discrete video card otherwise. The G31 version doesn't have this problem though.

Do you know if internet via the PCI ethernet card is slower than integrated ethernet?

[ghettro]

If you look at the specs on the asus site it says that the separate PCI card is only 10/100. A gigabit one is cheap as chips anyway.

[wryun]

Originally Posted by ghettro

There is a 945 version around for about $150 but from what I have read is that the motherboard for some reason has no ethernet built in, so they supply you with a separate 10/100 ethernet card which occupies the single PCI slot which I wanted for my TV tuner.

You could always pretend you have a Macbook Air and use a USB Ethernet dongle...

(I've just purchased this one; reasonably happy, especially considering the price of equivalent Shuttle boxes! Odd that the 945 version is so cheap here - not so in the US, at least relatively...)

[Tony]

interesting

how much was it btw.

and where did you get it from

i like the looks of the AMD 780g booksized one?

[ghettro]

$220 for the version I got, that is for the barebone only. I didn't actually think of USB ethernet when I got it Although I don't really regret my decision as I wanted the integrated graphics & gbit ethernet.

[Onyx]

I'm just waiting for the shops to re-open after their hols so I could get one (probably the Intel 945 version). It seems the Asus T3 series are the best looking and best value of the barebones bunch. Others in Asus' lineup are not much more than compact desktop or mATX minitower styles; and Shuttle's K4x series has no optical drive bay, a puny 100W PSU and no support for add-on video cards.

[ghettro]

yeah I got my one from skycomp, hey seem to have most of the range. There is also the slimmer ones, but AFAIK some of them have limited PCI expandability.