ASUS Motherboard mATX

[Amathus]

I have purcahsed an ASUS M3N78-EMH-HDMI Motherboard, isolated the on board graphics and installed an ASUS 8600GT Graphics card. CPU is AMD Phenom 9500 2.2Ghz, memory is 2Gb Corsair 1066, 2 x 500GB Seagate SATA with 32Mb Cache,  Hauppage NOVA T 500 Dual Tuner card. I cannot install 710 RC2 from DVD - Wizard fails to come up and all I get is a command line. Has anyone had this experience? Can anyone recommend an fully compatible ASUS main board which is mATX or any other CURRENT and  not obsolete mATX main board and graphics card that works? 

[colinjones]

means X is failing to start - probably because of some video hardware problem (likely because of the onboard and card graphics at the same time)

There are loads of forum posts and wiki articles on this stuff - start by reading through your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file - this the the log file generated when X is starting up and initialising all the devices and configuration. It should have plenty of pointers in there in the form of warnings and errors to tell you what is going wrong.

If you can't login to the text terminal you are getting (eg because it keeps flickering on and off as it repeatedly tries to start X) then use another PC on your network (Internal) and connect using PuTTY (free SSH term program).

Don't know what you mean by "isolate" your onboard graphics, but you need to disable it completely in your BIOS...

[Amathus]

Thanks Dave / Colinjones ... The chipset on the M3N78-EMH-HDMI ASUS mobo I am using is NVIDIA GeForce 8200.
We have disabled the on board graphics but we still cannot get past the prompt after loading the MCE 710 RC2 DVD - it does not launch the splash screen.

Question. The mobo you have suggested  - Asus M2NPV-VM  - is obsolete now and as far as I can tell the closest replacement is  M2N-VM HDMI with Nvidia GeForce7050PV/nForce630a chipset - would this be a good substitute?

Question.  is the graphics card I am using - ASUS 8600GT - is this supported by MCE?  I was told not to use the on board graphics as the HD playback would not be smooth so I pourchased a decent graphics card and I am at this dilemna.

Your help much apprecaited.