G35/33 X3500/3100 HDMI

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-02 18:28+0100 sim0n wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would be interested in buying a "Asus P5E-VM HDMI" motherboard, which
> has the G35 chipset and a X3500 graphics chip on-board including an HDMI
> connector.
>
> Is that chipset and graphics chip already supported (stable or devel) ?
>
>
> If not, is the G33 / X3100 supported

Here's my perspective as a user/bug reporter for the g33/ich9 chipset from
Intel.  My experience has been for the ASUS P5K-V Motherboard.

The embedded video chip for g33 is still pretty near the cutting edge so
expect some fairly long X outages like I experienced recently until a fix
was found (see
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-November/030623.html). BTW,
I think the g33 actually has a GMA 3100 not GMA X3100, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA .

> and does HDMI work ?

The ASUS P5K-V only has VGA output by default (which is what I bought). You
can buy a cheap ADD-on Intel card to give you digital output, and I believe
Intel has promised full xorg support for such solutions, but I am not sure
how mature that support is at this time.

The other issue with the g33/ich9 chipset for the ASUS P5K-V is the sound
which has only recently become supported by Alsa.  It works, but the quality
is pretty poor (irritating hum) at this time for kernel-2.6.22.  Again, I
think this is the result of hardware uncomfortably close to the cutting
edge, and I fully expect that this problem will disappear in the future
(perhaps even already with kernel-2.6.23, but Debian has not deployed that
kernel yet even for the unstable version of that distro).

Everything else with the ASUS P5K-V Motherboard works well including the
atl1 gigabit on-board LAN, the internal SATA ich9 interface, and the
external SATA JMicron interface which I use for esata drive backups.  I
don't think you could have said that for kernels much earlier than 2.6.22,
though.

Hope my recent experiences help you with your buying decision.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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