ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO/U3S6 & Hyper-V

[rkgraves]

Thanks for your help!

I'm wanting to buy an AMD3 desktop motherboard to dual-boot Windows 7 and Server 2008 w/Hyper-V. The motherboard I've selected is the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO/U3S6. I've downloaded the manual and it shows a bios setting for "Secure Virtual Machine Mode".

Questions:
- Is having that setting all I need?

- From the ASUS support site downloading the manual for the M4A785TD-V EVO/U3S6 gives me the manual for the M4A785TD-V EVO. Is it safe to assume the one manual covers both mobo's?

- Many have told me that hardware virtualization is a given for any new ASUS motherboard. Is this correct?

Thank you for your help! I'm having a terrible time trying to determine which Asus mobo's support hardware virtualization/hyper-v.

Best Regards,
Randy

 

[pleasenoname]

I only know the answer to one thing. The U3S6 is is an add on card(not a motherboard), that has its own manual. The U3S6 comes packed with the M4A785TD-V EVO.

I thought Hardware virtualization was dependent on the CPU supporting it.

 

[rkgraves]

Thanks for your reply and info on the U3S6. From what I know I believe both the motherboard/BIOS and CPU need to support virtualization in order to support Hyper-V. Win7 XPMode no longer requires hardware virtualization support, but I'm guessing it runs better with it.

 

[bifferos]

Really odd. I just bought this motherboard, fitted an AMD Phenom CPU, and I was wondering why VirtualBox wasn't supporting virtualisation extensions. Turns out the stupid motherboard BIOS *disables* this CPU functionality by default. I imagine it could be re-enabled at run-time with the correct instructions, since the BIOS is just software, but anyway. I can't imagine any scenario where having these extensions available to the operating system would cause any problem. You want them switched on not necessarily for the AMD-V instructions, but certainly for the nested paging, which considerably increases performance. You seem to enable both of these by selecting this option in the BIOS.

Once you switch on nested paging, Virtual Box does seem faster. Don't know what other software supports that, but I think VMWare ESX Server is one of them.