What is a good MB for a 64b Processor?

[stdPikachu]

I'm running both an MSI Neo2 Platinum and an Asus SLI Premium.

I really can't recommend that MSI though. The hardware seems solid, but MSI's BIOS support seems abysmally awful. Their forums are filled with people trying to get their boards to run dual core procs, and a series of buggy BIOSes from MSI have done all sorts of random damage - most famous of which is deleting the MAC address from the nVidia LAN chip, rendering it inoperable. They've also reported that you should use their (awful) bundled utility to update the BIOS through windows, rather than resort to a boot floppy or boot CD (which is what I do with all my Linux machines).

The Asus SLI Premium has been a much smoother ride though, and the heatpipe cooler on the chipset is a godsend (the chipset cooler on the Neo2 is very loud, thankfully it's just about replacable with one of Zalman's passive coolers). I'm not a gamer so I don't plan to use SLI in any shape or form, but the board has a highly compelling feature-set if you can justify the price. Updating the BIOS via a boot CD has worked fine for me, and there's support for dual core out of the box. Of course, you'll need a PCIe graphics card to use this board. I'm also hoping that 3ware will introduce a 4x PCIe RAID card so I can replace my PCI-bus bottlenecked 8006-2 with the two Raptors on it

As an aside, I really can't recommend PCI express enough. All that mucking about with AGPGART and xorg.conf is a thing of the past.

As regards component compatability, TTBOMK the hardware on all the boards works fine, although lm_sensors support is a bit dicky on both. Also bear in mind that many nForce3 boards still don't have a BIOS capable of running X2 chips.

[opentaka]

also, MSI boards are very poor at overclocking,
I guess merits of buying MSI boards is that their boardsd are cheap, resonable performance, no much trouble with drivers in linux.

I heard ASUS are good, also LANparty boards too.
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"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent" - Marilyn vos Savant

[xlulux]

[suhlhorn]

I'm putting together a dual opteron system. Any thoughts about the tyan thunder k8we?