Which Motherboard?

griffinme · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2005 Posts: 23

If you get a via chipset note that currently in the genkernel the velocity driver needed for your nic is not included by default.

Elsipkitch9809 · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 186

Hi,
I myself am taking my first steps in gentoo/amd64 and I wanted to ask a quick question or two.

I've been looking at mobo/cpu sets for a few weeks now, and I think I found the one that's probably going to be the most compatible and doable for a while.

http://www.smksuperstore.com/catalog/viewitem.asp?ID=13596

I wanted to go with that because the parts are generally the same price separate, and I can pay a little bit to have them pretest and install all the parts for me (thereby lessening the chance of me screwing up 200+ dollars like I did the last time I tried to build a complete system from scratch...).

What I want to know is: does this combination look good as a gentoo system?

Also, for the last two years I was on an ibook, so I got very jaded against nvidia cards for 3d (as they completely suck for ppc) so I bought myself a radeon 9250se card for less than 35 bucks. I don't buy new pc games anymore (just console) but I'd be using older 3d games that I have. How is support for this? I've read that you can use the open source driver as well, so I hope support is good.

Anyway, I hope people still read this post, I'd like to order my mobo/cpu combo soon

P.S. Does the amd64 need registered ram? I've been scouring the net trying to find the exact ram I need for this system, and all I can come up with is 184 pin DDR 400/333 PC3200. The last thing I need is bad memory (especially since I want to get a lot of it). Thanks!

pinr · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2005 3:49 pm Post subject:

Hi Alaterale I was the original poster of this thread and I can tell you that I eventually settled on the Gigabyte GA-K8NS motherboard and an AMD 64 2800 procesor. I have been very very happy with this combination everything is working on the motherboard including network, sound, sata and icsensors and I have no problems. Current uptime is 181 hours. I looked at the link you sent and I noticed they had the Gigabyte GGigabyte GA-K8NPro, which I guess is pretty much the same as mine ( can't remember the exact difference between the pro and mine) so I can recomend that MB. However, I noticed that the price of the Gigabyte is $107 more than the ASrock MB. It seems they are only charging $153 for both the processor and MB (is this correct?) that is in fact what I paid just for my processor here in Mexico two months back. All I can say is at that price it has to be a bargin. They are virtually giving the MB away free so maybe it is worth a try and if it doesn't work with Linux you can just chuck it and upgrade to something better.

Elsipkitch9809 · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 186

Well, it appears that the only thing they're giving away is the fan and heatsink, as I can get the mobo and cpu separately for pretty much the same cost:

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=AX642800&c=pw
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=MB-K8U1689&c=pw#

I don't know about the gigabyte board, but I like the asrock because I can upgrade to a 939 socket cpu in the future if I want.

Also, there's the benefit of paying a little extra for them to pretest and install the cpu fan and heatsink and make sure it works before they send it out. I'm thinking of doing that instead of risking screwing up the install myself.

I have another question, since you have the same processor. How much heat does it generate? What kind of fan/heatsink/getup do you have on your system? It's been a really hot summer where I am (upstate NY), though my apt has brand new insulation which helps a great deal (lowers the in house temp by quite a bit, but it still remains warm on the wicked hot days). Do you have any problems keeping it cool enough to run? My last x86 system was a dual athlon mp which overheated quite a few times during the summer... had so many fans in that thing everywhere, and it still got too hot

I thought about water cooling, but I mainly want to save money overall on this thing, especially since I want to get lots of ram

pinr · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2005 4:22 pm Post subject:

downey · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2005 4:32 pm Post subject:

Thought I'd let you know that you don't need registered RAM for AMD64. The one thing I did find is that you have to use Single sided RAM, not double sided. I had a stick of Kingston double sided 512M ram that I was going to use but it doesn't seem to work. I then got another single sided stick and everything is fine now. The single sided requirement might also be a socket 939 thing as well. I went with an ASUS K8N-SLI board and so far it's been pretty good. The only thing that is wrong with the board is the extremely load northbridge fan. I replaced that and now everything is running well.

I would stick with a 939 socket system unless you really want to try to save every penny as it gives you better memory speed. Also most PCI express boards are 939 boards. So unless you are trying to use an older video card I would go with PCI express.

Hope that helps.

Elsipkitch9809 · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 186

Alrighty thanks for the update on heat with the amd64 setup

I think I'm going to go grab that combo after all, it seems to be the best price for a decent 64 system.

downey: Thanks, I won't buy registered, I'm not sure about the single sided, but I'll try that too.
As far as 939 goes, it's more expensive, and I have a lot of other things to pay for, so I don't want to go overboard on this new computer. As it is, I'm only going to buy this combo plus I already bought a very cheap radeon 9250 and a case with a few fans. Overall, it should come out to around 300 for the combo, case, and video card and ram. I have everything else already in spare parts from older computers. And the good thing about this mobo is that it does have a 939 upgrade daughter board, so I can get a 939 socket cpu in there eventually if I want, not to mention I could also just upgrade the 754 cpu as well to a higher number. So it looks pretty good to me, but that's just me

Anyway, thanks for everyone's help

meyerm · Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:15 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I've read the discussion so far and it is quite interesting for me since I plan to jump onto the AMD64 waggon. :-)

The different manufacturers of chipsets have been discussed looking at the quality of their chips and summerizing I may say that nVidia or VIA are good or even the only choices. Now I've read things like http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24910 (also some other concerning RAM which I can't find now) in which VIA is said to have some problems.

So I'm quite unsure what to choose. It seems that nVidia is - like always - not very supportive to the OS community. Therefore I'd like to avoid them as possible. I do not need the last bit of performance - I guess the difference between VIA and nVidia are marginal. But how's the OS support of VIA? Are they any better? Or are the drivers for their chipset (SATA RAID, network and sound) "just" reverse engineered like most of nVidias? So I'd like to know: which would be the better political choice (or less worse ;-)

).

Thank you,
Marcel

PS: F.ex. I'm currently looking at the "A8V-E Deluxe" vs. the "A8N (SLI) Deluxe".

stonie · Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2005 8:22 pm Post subject:

Hiho,

I have good experiences with my Asus A8N-E (no-sli) with the nvidia nforce 4 ultra chipset.
Got everything up and running exept of the sata-raid - which i don't need.
I am not using any SATA drives - so I can't tell you about SATA support on the nforce 4 ultra.
--edit
(Ah forgot - I also have the onboard sound deactivated cause I got a seperate sound card with a better output quality. I read in the forums that nforce sound should work somehow - although it seems that there are some problems with 5.1 sound....)
--edit
But I recently installed Gentoo on a computer with an Gigabyte K8NS-Ultra-939 with SATA drive and nforce 3 and had no problems.
I read somewhere that nforce 3 and nforce 4 are nearly the same (main difference is supposed to be PCI-E support in nforce 4).
Also I couldn't say that the forcedeth drivers (eth) had a poor performance.
Rock solid, very stable and lightning fast.
Have fun building your system

_________________
How could I know what I think before I realized what I said???

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=63327

Elsipkitch9809 · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 186

In general I heard that VIA's support in linux is pretty much universal. I'm not sure if its from reverse engineering or just that they love linux, but so many via things work great.

I had to change the board I was going to buy because by the time I was ready to order, it had doubled in price. So I just recently ordered myself a Asus a8v board (non deluxe--it was extra money for features which I probably would never use, which from what I could tell were just audio post messages and wifi@home). I should be getting it set up in a couple weeks, so I'll be officially on the amd64 bandwagon then :-P

As far as nforce goes, it seems to be a split issue here, so I didn't want to risk it.

Oh yeah, and my new video card is a radeon 9250, which is, I heard, the last radeon to be supported under the fully open source drivers, so with luck I won't have to use binary drivers

pinr · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 3:00 pm Post subject:

meyerm · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 3:10 pm Post subject:

Hi,

lotw · Guru Joined: 09 Jan 2005 Posts: 342 Location: Palmdale

The main problem with the Nforce chipset, at least the nforce3, is that it takes a lot of your processor away when using the discs heavily. Copy large files and your computer chugs along.

That is why when I went for a 64b I got the ASUS A8V (has a 939 socket), great board and is only $90 (US) from www.newegg.com. ATI video card do suck when it comes to Linux, their drivers are horrible with only a few people getting them to work in 64b mode. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, which I cannot get to work correctly in 64b or even in KDE at all. nVidia has better driver support for Linux, just make sure you don't get a special nVidia card, like the MSI NX6200AX with HDTV support (Their BIOS doesn't get the card to show as a nvidia chip).

Everything on the ASUS A8V with the VIA chipset works perfect in Linux. SATA, IDE, Network, etc.

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

For the guys who've said SiS is junk, well some of the boards aren't as high quality because of what the manufacturers put into them.

However, based on my experiences with both nvidia and via chipsets I'd have to say they're more stable.

My via experience is a bit old, I haven't played with them since the KT333A days. I just know IO performance is pathetic, throw in a 3ware card & gigabit & try to burn a cd. Good luck doing anything.

At work similar deal. Tried some via based opteron (1xx) boards. They worked fine, only problem was we blew 3 of the boards. That was probably Asus's fault.

Then we went with some socket 754/939 nforce3 250 boards. So far we've had 5 of the onboard gigabit controllers fail. That's MSI and Asus both.

For athlonXP's we found the sis boards to give us the most stable performance as beater machines that needed lots of good IO. When it comes to athlon64 the nforce's are pretty fast but we've had problems with their stabilty, especially using WildCat cards (funny since they're owned by nvidia). For what we do we always for some reason end up going back to buying SiS since they seem to be more stable for us across the board, both linux & windows.

And sadly AGP support still isn't quite where it should be with my sis board. I still end up having to hack the agp/amd64_agp.c file for every release for my 760. Other than that it runs just great.

avieth · Veteran Joined: 17 Sep 2004 Posts: 1945 Location: Canada

Abit AN8 SLI Fatal1ty

Pretty expensive price tag for a mobo, but its soooooo goood

hooflungpoo · n00b Joined: 10 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

longship

As of the latest kernels the nForce4 chipset motherboards are supported fully out of the box by the kernel without adding extra drivers.

I have kernel 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 and an ASUS A8N-Sli Premium MoBo. It just works perfectly. Other nForce4 based MoBos should work the same.