nforce2 vs kt600 for linux?

laidback · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

I will be upgrading my very old Celeron 300a->450 system and am thinking of a system based around the Athlon XP 2500+ cpu. I understand that the nvforce2 400 boards are the better performer, but my main criteria are system stability and linux support. I am concerned that much of nvidia's hardware is closed and drivers must often be downloaded from their site (e.g. net, audio, etc). If I want to upgrade to a new kernel, will I need to check nvidia's site first to see if their drivers are compatible?

This will be a home machine, used a little for entertainment (music/video), but mostly for development with perl and databases (mysql/postgresql). I might play a little with overclocking, but this is the least of my concerns. Extra ports/features are nice, but not too important. I have old network (tulip), audio (es1371) and firewire cards that have worked fine in the past that I don't mind reusing. Raid would be fun to play with, but again, not that important to me.

Anybody have any comments/recommendations? Can anybody speak to these issues? i.e. rock solid stability and linux support?

thanks!!

Apreche · Guru Joined: 18 Sep 2003 Posts: 506 Location: Beacon, NY

I have the Abit NF7-S and an Athlong XP 2500+ CPU. Let me tell you, the gentoo is the awesome. But if you want the serial ATA to work well, use the 2.6 kernel. Stability is rock solid when configured properly. All the drivers can be easily got using emerge and there is no need to go to nvidias site. Everything works great with gentoo. You can't go wrong, if it doesn't work it's because you did it wrong. But I warn you, get an Nvidia Video card, an ATI in an nforce board is a wee bit fickle, but it will work if you really want an ATI card that badly.

laidback · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

Thanks for the info. Sounds like the Abit board is a good one.

Any other experiences, positive or negative, out there? Any via fans care to comment?

Malakin · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 8:48 pm Post subject:

Personally I avoid any motherboards using fans since it not only makes noise but is another point of failure, I've had to replace several. The Abit Abit NF7-S has a fan.

Here's a good board at a good price: (~$59usd)
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/pd_spec.asp?product_id=380

Or you could go with the Asus A7N8X-X (~$72usd) or A7N8X-DX (~$110usd) depending on what features interest you.

Soltek has some decent nforce2 boards but their website only seems to work in IE which is enough reason not to buy anything from them I think :)

laidback · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

Good point about fans... have to admit that has occurred to me when thinking about mobos. thanks!

As I've been searching for info on this subject, I came across this page on setting up Linux on an Abit NF7-S.

http://www.dnaresearch.com.au/linux_on_abit_nf7s.shtml

In this case, the author was installing RH9, but the lessons may be useful to gentoo as well.

Wedge_ · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 9:13 pm Post subject:

I've been using an A7N8X-Deluxe with Gentoo since December last year, and it's been working very well. The only time it gets unstable is if you enable APIC support in the kernel. Other than that, I'm very happy with it, the nForce2s are really nice boards.

laidback · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

Thanks all for the suggestions/comments!

Seems like everybody is recommending the nforce2 boards for stability and support.

Anybody using anything else for the Athlon XP processors? e.g., KT600?

Thanks!

brian33x51 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 118

At work we've been heavily using SiS 745 based boards for doing heavy duty IO intensive tasks (3ware + gigabit). We have like 7 of them, but not on desktops.

We just built a new system with a sis 748 gigabyte board. It's been okay, but we had to turn off the APIC option, it spat out tons and tons of errors with it on. But that system we burned in with a 3ware, gigabit nic and an adaptec scsi with an LTO2 drive attached. For a couple of days we were processing, writing tapes and doing 2 simul copies with the machine.

I built a desktop system with an 746 board, I put Fedora Core1 on it. I originally had a gf3 ti 200 in it but couldn't get the damn thing to work with the binary drivers. I slapped in a radeon 7200 and it has zero problems with AGP (have to use try_unsupported=1 flag) and the xfree drm drivers.

The SiS boards seem to be very solid boards and they have monstrous IO throughput. I think they have the best performing PCI/IDE bus controllers around. The problem with is that the manuf seem to cut some corners on them. The chipset heat sink doesn't cut it when running a 400fsb on the 748. We decided to put a fan on the chipset. I guess a much bigger heatsink would do it to.

I'm not as familiar with the nforce2 boards, I just know they have the squirrely closed source driver thing going and they don't have quite the PCI/IDE bus throughput the sis ones have.

dmwilcox · n00b Joined: 10 Jul 2003 Posts: 24 Location: Cali

i'd run a search just on these forums with:

'nforce2 unstable'
'kt400 unstable'

and keep some of the problems you see in mind. I jumped on the nforce2 boat (for the integration really) and it works like a champ but on this binary install of gentoo is proving to be unstable under heavy AGP load--onboard graphics.

its got its issues, and there are several options for getting each piece of the onboard sound/nic/graphics working.

D