Which Athlon MP motherboard to buy?

kermitjunior · Apprentice Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 167

OK,

I have two lovely Athlon MP 2600 cpus to pop into a motherboard. I'd like stability and good Gentoo compatibility. USB 2.0, ATA 100 (133 would be nice), 1GB LAN, and I'll be putting in about 1-2 GB RAM.

The best I can come up with is:

this tyan

But it doesn't have USB 2.0 and it's an older model. Please give it a go at the recommendations. Also, what case/psu might someone recommend that is maybe not plain vanilla and QUIET?

Thanks!
KJ
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Toshiba Satellite A15-S157, 2.2 Celery, 40GB, 512MB
AMD Athlon XP 1900+, 640MB PC2100, ABIT KG-7R
IBM 120GB (Linux), WD 30GB (WinDoze), ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro PCI

timfreeman · Posted: Fri May 23, 2003 7:30 pm Post subject:

The thing I had most trouble with was finding a standard ATX motherboard. I eventually DIDN'T find one that was just right. I went with this Gigabyte board. It's got onboard RAID problems though.

And it's 12"x10.6", so I've gone with a big case, good thing it'll be out of the way .. does not have 1GB LAN either, so not what you are looking for. [edit - uh, most midtowers fit it, actually, sorry]

Is the k7x pro too much money? (but it has no USB2)

I find the forums at 2cpu to be quite helpful even if it's not gentoo related. And their reviews.

good luck, will you tell me if you find something wonderful? I still have time to return the gigabyte.....
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timfreeman · Posted: Fri May 23, 2003 7:39 pm Post subject:

also, reading on the forum here, was pointed to this link where it has a note about that Tyan board you're looking at:

"Early models apparently had bugs. Be sure you have a recent BIOS and a recent 2.2.x or 2.4.x kernel."
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kermitjunior · Apprentice Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 167

On the tyan side of the house, Newegg list two...

two similar boards

Other than price and Gbit LAN, what else should I be concerned about with regards to raw speed of compiling. For 140, I could buy a USB 2 card and Gbit can wait a bit longer.

Thanks again.
KJ
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Toshiba Satellite A15-S157, 2.2 Celery, 40GB, 512MB
AMD Athlon XP 1900+, 640MB PC2100, ABIT KG-7R
IBM 120GB (Linux), WD 30GB (WinDoze), ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro PCI

timfreeman · Posted: Fri May 23, 2003 8:35 pm Post subject:

I was just reading in this thread here on the forums that the Asus A7M266-D mobo has superior overclocking abilities plus it comes with a USB2.0 card .. !

For those not already possessing the CPUs, you can mod XPs to get it to work like MPs, but read up and be careful because some mobos and BIOSs won't support it .. here's the link for the older chips and here is a link to a new article about modding Bartons.

As for compiling, here is a thread about speeding it up with two processors. I'm glad I just read it, too, it says we should -march for XP and not MP!

As for hardware, I've been working under the assumption that the better the processors and the more cache and RAM you have, the faster the compiles will go. (so anyone without processors yet should get a barton XP with 512k L2 cache and mod it to a MP). I may just return my damn processors while I'm at it, heh, could save another 100 bucks.

Anyone know more about it? I don't know what else could be involved for fast compiling except i/o.. there's some threads on here about this, but I haven't found much except scattered comments ..
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ronmon · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 2:11 pm Post subject:

I've had an A7M266-D running a couple of "defogged" XP1800's since last December. The four port PCI USB2.0 card that is included works fine with the usb-ohci and ehci-hcd modules.

The "-march=athlon-mp" flag never caused me any problems. YMMV of course.