Recommend a motherboard (athlon) please

counterpt · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 66

Hi,
This is probably a bad question.
Can someone recommend a motherboard that has ata100 but no scsi or promise chips (or doesn't recquire you to use them). I had a soyo dragon plus (via kt266) that's dying and was curious what others recommend.
The platform is athlon. I had an Asus a7v (via kt133), which was incredibly stable butI ran it with ata33 since I never got the promise controller to work ( I spent months trying).
Since I have the ram and a few athlons, I'd happily take reomndations for pc133 and pc266 memory compatible boards.
At this point I'm inclinded to buy soyos because I don't have to fight with drivers. I'm sure there are better choices? I know some of the abits have goofy controllers too so I try to stay away too

Even better if it doesn't have screaming chipset fan

Thanks a lot!

taskara · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 7:39 am Post subject:

well ..

I think via has pretty good support for linux, at least their drivers are in the kernel..

I however am currently running an nforce2 mainboard (Asus A7N8X) and it is phenominal.

I guess you need to ask yourself whether you want onboard raid, do you want serial raid ? do you want DUAL DDR technology ? do you want agp 8X ? do u want onboard graphics ? onboard nic ? how much do you want to spend?

the fastest athlon board atm is the nforce2... of which soyo does not have a model..

let me know what you think you want, etc and I'd be glad to help you out..
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counterpt · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 66

Thanks.
AGP 4x is good enough (if 8x is backward comptabile then it doesn't matter).
I really don't care if it has onboard graphics/lan/sound. On my old Soyo, Gentoo wouldn't compile if I had either the onboard lan or sound enabled. So if a motherboard has these, I would probably disable them as I did with the soyo and just add pci cards instead.
Basically I'm looking for the easiest way. On my old asus a7v, I couldn't get Gentoo to find anything on the promise controller so I was stuck at ata33. RedHad could find drives on it but I'm beyond redhat now

So I know it's possible but since I have to get a new MB, I'd rather get one that I don't have to fight with...

Just to give you and insight to my backward mentality: I had a Radeon 8500dv and I fought with it for a few days then I bought a cheapo GeForce just because there were instructions for it in the Gentoo documentaion...

I liked the via kt133 and kt233 because everything was in the kernel.
I don't want to use any sort of raid at all. The soyo seemed to have ata100 without needing any drivers at all. I would love to get an Asus or something but I don't want to find out later that I have to use Promise or Highpint or whatever goofy chip they have.

Since I have to get 2 boards, I don't want to spend too much on a pc133 compatible one (looking for used ones on ebay). The other one I can spend more on since I learned something a while ago:
I can either buy a cheap motherboard, get frustrated, and buy an expensive one. Or I can buy and expensive motherboard in the first place and save some money!

Thanks again.

chh · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 8:17 am Post subject:

Hi,

I am using the Dragon plus myself since last year and I am rather enthusiastic about it. Though I must say that LAN and sound work fine here with Gentoo (1.2 and 1.4), only waiting to try to use surround sound.

But now to your actual question. If you are satisfied with your Dragon then stick with its younger brothers, as I here the Dragon Ultra is very stable, fast and has good componentes on board, like the Dragon plus. That's why I chose it, you probably, too.
The only alternative for me would be one of the MSI boards.
After all on a chipset level I would normaly prefer the nforce2 (they seem to be far better than the KT400), with seperate graphics of course. But as Linux support is really weak till now you should stick with a VIA chipset.

Regards

Christian

taskara · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 11:59 am Post subject:

well..

if you don't need super dooper graphics, then I would probably recommend an nforce2 mainboard with onboard VIDEO and sound and LAN.

they often also come with firewire, optical in / out, serial ata (supported by 2.5x kernels) usb 2.0, and a gf2 mx 440 type graphics. it is everything you would need, and more.

the support for it is good - fast ide ata 133 (using generic ide driver) the sound is brilliant using alsa, the nforce network card is detected and fully supported by the gentoo 1.4 cd. firewire and usb2 all work flawlessly, it's DUAL DDR and it's faaaast.

my western digital hdd test shows:

fca · Guru Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 346 Location: Netherlands

However, if you want easy support (like it being detected in the normal kernel, instead of having to run vanilla-sources or ac-sources) and your network card detected out of the box, and simple sound setup, I wouldn't recommend any nForce 2 board for Linux.
I have one working, but it learned me a lot about kernel drivers, modules and all that kinds of things. Stay with a Via (and not a KT400) for out of the box detection and that sort of thing.

counterpt · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 66

Wow, thanks a lot for the help.
I'm begining to think something was wrong specifically with the boards I have (Since I had trouble and others didn't with the onboard components on the same board). I think that's why I got so frustrated--maybe my hardware was bad.
Wow, now I don't know! I thought newer kt's (above 266) weren't suppoerted yet either so I'd have to muck with kernel anyway, then it's not that much more work for nforce. I wonder if you lose much if you use the vanilla kernel instead of the gentoo-sources... To be honest I was looking at other kt266s since I didn't thank the ram speed made a huge difference.
I hadn't even considered the nforce, I was just thinking about the via's. I have all the componets anyway so I don't care that much about onboard stuff.
But you guys are really tempting me with the nforce (I run chemistry calculations (fortran) so floating point and fast ram (if it makes that much difference) are just so tempting). I use it for everyday stuff too and a little for games.

Well, thanks a lot for the links and the suggestions, I have to read up and do more reasearch on it. Thanks for the head's up on the kt400.

I can't say it enough, I don't know how to thank you...!

chh · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 5:33 pm Post subject:

counterpt · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 66

Malakin · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 8:11 pm Post subject:

taskara · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 9:47 pm Post subject:

taskara · Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 9:58 pm Post subject:

oh btw, I forgot to mention I also have a asus A7V333 and A7V8X (kt333 and kt400) as well as my nforce board.

don't forget gentoo 1.4_rc3 is sheduled for release thursday (US time) and it will have nforce nic support built into the boot cd.

anyway it's all up to you, perhaps if you already have video card and sound and nic, you might not want to get an nforce with it all onboard. then again the kt400 chipsets also come with onboard nic (the asus is broadcom - which is harder to get working than the nforce!

) and also onboard sound (realtek ALC650) which is not too bad, but not as good as the nforce.

Considering an nforce2 mainboard comes with an onboard gf4 mx, and dolby digital sound and (sometimes) dual network cards.. the slightly higher cost is probably reduced to a saving.

Also for your information, I have an AMD 2400+ cpu, running at default speeds (133 fsb) with 2x 512mb corsair pc3500 DDR sdram (220fsb) running in dual ddr mode. this is overkill because I won't run my cpu at 200 mhz fsb, but u should get pc 2700 ddr cas2 ram.
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Kororaa install method - have Gentoo up and running quickly and easily, fully automated with an installer!

dsegel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Posts: 127

I'm using an ASUS A7N266, which is a low-end built-in-everything mobo. The 1.4rc2 LiveCD already had the nvnet drivers for the NIC, the sound is standard Intel (as mentioned) and the gentoo nvidia drivers work fine for X.

I had to download and install the nvnet driver after install 'cause they weren't installed from the CD, but other than that I've had no real issues to speak of.

Oh yeah - GRUB doesn't work 'cause the onboard video uses shared RAM and something's not happy. Not a problem for me because I like lilo better anyway.

taskara · Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 2:42 am Post subject:

fyi, ASUS A7N266 is the original nforce (nforce 1).. which can still be bought and uses DDR sdram and has gf2mx video onboard, 100Mbit nic and various chipsets for sound.

one this to remember, if you buy ANY nforce product, u need TWO memory modules, so that you can take advantage of DUAL DDR
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Kororaa install method - have Gentoo up and running quickly and easily, fully automated with an installer!

Malakin · Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 3:45 am Post subject:

taskara · Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 9:32 am Post subject:

I think the nforce 1 also used "dual ddr" technology, tho it wasn't called that. I think it was 128bit memory instead of 64 or something.. but having 2 memory sticks does make a hell of a difference on my msi nforce 1 mainboard.

how did you emerge memtester? I'd like to check my speed.. and post the results if I get it to work

_________________
Kororaa install method - have Gentoo up and running quickly and easily, fully automated with an installer!

EvilReagan · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 8 Location: Rochester, NY

Right now I'm running Gentoo on a Gigabyte GA-7VRXP. No problems with the onboard LAN, sound, or USB. I haven't tried the Promise driver, you can turn it off in BIOS. Uses up to PC2700. I haven't had a single crash yet in Gentoo (only a couple months), and only 10 or so in WinXP (over a year... bleh). When I say crash, I mean even an app crashing. This board is a rock.

counterpt · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 66

This is a great amount of info. Thanks a lot. And I have some choices. I wonder if there's a list of easy to set up hardware for everything, not just compatible ones :-)

I'm good to go though, thanks again.

Just to answer your question:

dweigert · Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 9:41 pm Post subject:

Just remember to get a GOOD power supply. A no-name, or under sized one can kill system stability as well.

Malakin · Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 9:57 pm Post subject:

fca · Guru Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 346 Location: Netherlands

aardvark · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2002 Posts: 576

sl70 · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2002 Posts: 455 Location: Saitama, JP

I've been drooling over the EPoX EP-8RGA+ (with the nforce2 IGP) for months, now, but it hasn't come out yet. They are telling me now it will be about 2 weeks. But just today I read on the linux-xfs list that there are problems using the xfs filesystem with the nforce2. Does anyone have any experience with this? :?:

jing · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2003 Posts: 18

fishhead · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 5:57 am Post subject:

I have a Tyan Tiger MP board and I must say that I'm very happy with it. The Tyan Thunder is also good. I ultimatly turned AGP off because the NVidia drivers weren't being nice, but other than that, it's been very stable. I've had a chipset overheating problem when I'm in my hot (90+ F in the summer) dorm room, with my very crappy case that gets HORRIBLE air flow, and overtaxed power supply ... but my circumstances are a bit extreme and were fixed by ataching a small house fan to the case and having it blow directly on the chipset. When my dorm room was not so hot, I ran it for (usualy) 20 - 30 day blocks, turning it off only to change bios settings or do stuff with the hardware. I've had it stay up 92 days ... this would have been longer had I not wanted to switch from Red Hat to Gentoo.

If you have an Athlon XP then you could actualy use the second processor as well (XP = MP - "Official AMD support").

I would also stay away from (among others) K7A and K7A-RAID boards. Apperantly they used an experimental process in the capacitors on the board that has resulted in boards dieing after about two years. I've seen this happen to not one but TWO diffrent K7A boards within a few months of each other. They work fine one day .... then ... POOF! Dead.