Customer Reviews

ZOTAC GF9300-I-E LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bought this for an HTPC running Windows 7 Home premium. Everything works great.

One issue that I do have, with this motherboard, is the wireless is a little on the slow side. Streaming most content works fine, but, I also record HD TV, using a hauppauge 2250 card. The standard definition shows stream great, to my other PCs, but the HD jumps and stutters constantly. When I disabled the wireless and ran a cable to my router, it worked fine.

I paired this board with a C2Duo e6300, 4gb ram and windows 7. It has enough horsepower to play games at low quality and does a great job with bluray and HD video. I did have to RMA the board once but Zotac customer service was easy to work with and I got the new board in less than 9 days from the date I shipped it. Great option and solid performing board.

I've had this board about a month and it has worked flawlessly. It came right up and ran after installing in my system. Everything seems to work as I expected. The BIOS has extra features for overclocking but, I will probably never use on this setup and have no comment on that portion. This board was installed in an HP slimline which originally had a low performing single channel memory setup made by Foxconn. Thi Zotac was near a perfect replacement for the Foxconn. Had 2 Foxconn boards go bad and wasn't going to spend more cash on those. Don't completely blame Foxconn but more so HP for specifying a low cost board.

I have been using this board in a newly built HTPC for about 4 months now - everything works perfectly as advertised. My system includes windows 7, 2 GB DDR 800 and a dual core 5300 cpu (2.6 Ghz). The Board allowed overclocking the CPU to 3.0 ghz - which is more than enough for my use.

I use this mainly for Home Theater - playing movies (DVD rips) from my server and watching netflix/Hulu HD streams, and light gaming.

Pros:
* Plays DVD and HD (1080P) videos with absolute ease! The video processing on this board is fantastic - DVD movies look just fine on my plasma: all from the onboard graphics.

* Has all necessary video/audio outputs for Home Theater use - I use the coax for audio and HDMI for video - you could use the HDMI for audio as well.

* Does not require expensive hardware to build a good movie watching system - cheap dual core, 2 gb ram (HD of course). Fits nicely in a APEX MI-008 case with a low profile cpu cooler.

* Decent audio processing for analog playback.

* Wake on USB signal.

Cons: At this price and with these features - NONE!

Overall this is a great board for movie/netflix viewing. I tried some newer game demos - almost all are playable under lower graphics settings - but there is a slot to add a video card for improved gameplay.

Highly Recommended.

I got this board to replace my Intel DG45FC mainly because this had the Wifi add-on and a PCI-Ex16 slot.

Once I swapped out my parts:

CASE: APEX MI-100 (250W PSU - will be changing this soon)
CPU: Intel E7200 Core 2 Duo
MEM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
HD: HITACHI Deskstar P7K500 500GB

I hit the power button to boot it up and all I got was a blank screen...I thought I had a defective board. I finally got it to work after clearing the CMOS and making sure my memory was well seated. Did a fresh install on Win7 64bit, installed the drivers and now my HTPC is back in business.

One thing I like about this board is that with my previous board (DG45FC), most of the time when it went to sleep due to inactivity, it would lose the video signal to my monitor, and I would have to restart the system. So far I have not had that issue with this board.

Pros:

* Excellent Mini-ITX board, at a good price.
* PCI-Ex16 slot
* Wifi-Add on (its not 802.11n, but it works)
* Was able to overclock my Intel E7200 from 2.53 GHz to 3.2 GHz (still experimenting to find the max)

Cons: none really, except I needed to download the 64bit drivers online, as most are not included on the CD - the autorun app would not start in Win7 64bit.


It's definitely a board I would recommend for anyone wanting to build their own HTPC.