Hi guys, just installed my M7F over the weekend and have a few questions. First is audio.

I have the latest (from Asus) drivers installed and my normal audio is by optical cable to a 5.1 receiver and speakers. I have the audio mode set to 5.1 DTS Connect. I see no real options for configuring anything for the optical output. If I'm playing music (have not tested a game) it suddenly allows me to choose music or movies sound mode but that's it. The little graphic also always shows two speakers. I'm coming from an HT Omega Claro Halo soundcard which uses a C-Media chip instead. It supported both DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live and you always had a dropdown to tell it how many channels of sound were being input and how many your output should be and also level adjustments for each speaker.

When I play a 2 channel mp3 on the M7F it is doing some sort of processing because I do get sound out of all speakers and the receiver switches to show all 5.1 speakers recognized in the feed. I guess I just want to make sure that if I have a game with surround sound ability running that I'm actually getting those channels out of the M7F via the DTS Connect and the Realtek chip. I didn't replace my HT Omega with a PCIE version because I was under the assumption that the M7F does do this where on-board sound used to not be able to. I know I could just switch to the analog mini-jack outputs but I'd rather not.

Also I've noticed the Mic input on my Sennheiser PC-350 is very very weak. I'm connected via front panel audio jacks. My case (HAF-X) has both HD and AC97 connectors and I went with the HD one and set it as such in the BIOS. If I turn the mic boost to 30 I finally get some volume out of the mic but it's quite noisy. Never had this problem on my dedicated sound card and the Sennheiser has a very good mic. Should I try the AC97 setup instead? I think I read somewhere around here some mic problems with the HD version.

Ok, sorry for the long post above for the audio, but have some confusion on setting up my CPU fans now as well. Previous board I just set the CPU fan to be max speed in BIOS so I always had good cooling and never used any software controls. I'm kind of overwhelmed with all the fan options both in BIOS and the AI Suite software. How do you guys have your cpu fans set up? Do you just go into BIOS and select manual and set the graph to full, do you do a curve? Do you use the AI Suite fan control module?

I installed that software but I'm not sure about that whole EPU module supposedly playing with voltages to save power and such. Do people actually use that software suite? I guess I'm just nervous and a bit confused by it because I've never really used anything like that before. I'm used to controlling voltages and fans in the BIOS and not using software. I mostly installed the fan xpert just to see what speeds the BIOS was running the CPU fan at, then I realized it also can fully control it from inside Windows too and wasn't just a monitor as described in the little text in the installer utility.