AMD64 - The Hardware that works .. mobo reviews & urls

cricalix · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 2:46 pm Post subject: K8N Pro works

Picked up a K8N Pro the other day, and it works pretty well. Starting X seems a little slow though, as if the nvidia driver is having issues. Getting the initial login prompt up in text mode also takes time - but having never run Gentoo before, I don't know if this is a Gentoo issue or a box issue.

I don't know if the onboard SATA works, I don't have SATA drives. I believe the chipset is one of the 'sorta works' ones though.

The Gigaraid requires a driver from the manufacturer, and seems to have issues. When I put my 2x120 drives back into the RAID, I'll post an update - I remember something about a 'request already made' error when using the RAID.

molander · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 8:58 pm Post subject: Re: K8N Pro works

get sirius · Guru Joined: 27 Apr 2002 Posts: 316 Location: Madison, WI

Two systems:
1) Tyan K8W Thunder with two Opteron 248s, 2 GBs of Corsair low-latency reg. twinx memory (4x512), Gainward FX5700Ultra graphics card, two 37GB Raptors on 3Ware 8506 SATA controller card (having to use a riser card until the upgraded replacement is available), and one Maxtor 20GB IDE hard drive [used for booting the root and swap partitions on sda and sdb (the Raptors)], Plextor Premium CD/RW, Plextor DVD/ROM, LS-120 and floppy drives, and Antec TruePower550 p/s. On sda, I'm running Gentoo with kernel 2.6.3, ext2 for boot and ext3 for root. On sdb, I have Gentoo with kernel 2.6.4, ext2 for boot and reiser-3.6 for root {screwed up the install on sdb, however, and am going to have to redo it [missed Brad's notice about /dev missing on the 2004.0 livecd, cobbled my own work-around (which seemed to work

but evidently did not)]}.

2)MSI K8T Neo FSR with Athlon 64 3400+, 1GB Corsair low-latency twinx memory (2x512), Asus GeForce 3 card, SBLive, one 20GB Maxtor hard drive, a Creative CD/ROM drive, and a floppy. Running Gentoo with kernel 2.6.3, ext2 boot and ext3 root.

Both machines running great!

Hey, did anyone else try that miserable excuse for an O/S called MS 64-bit Windows XP? Got the freebie cd to try it for grins and giggles, tried it on machine #2 above, and couldn't get it to work once, in spite of trying it three times with complete HD low-level formats in between and playing with different BIOS settings. I despise MS and it tickles me to see how far they've got to go. :lol:

srs5694 · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 5:05 am Post subject:

cbreaker · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:33 am Post subject:

quag7 · Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:58 pm Post subject:

Some time has passed since this thread became inactive.

I'm getting ready to put a system together now, and I imagine since this thread was active in 2004, some new motherboards have come on the market. I'm looking for recommendations - here are my needs:

(*) Need at least one standard PCI slot
(*) Don't want or need onboard sound or video
(*) Want to put an Athlon 64 X2 on it.

I'm looking for something ultra-reliable and, of course, fast. I've always felt that cutting corners with motherboards was a bad idea. So I am interested to hear from folks who have been running boards for awhile about their experiences.

I've read about a lot of success with MSI K8T Neo. Is this still a popular board? For those of you using it, how has it been? In the past I've used mainly Asus boards, so I'd be curious to hear opinions about those too.
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munsen · n00b Joined: 15 Jan 2005 Posts: 49 Location: Pennsylvania

If you really like Asus I can recommend the Asus A8N-SLI Premium. I've been using this board for about a month with no issues that werent solved by looking at my kernel config.

quag7 · Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 9:34 am Post subject:

Somewhat frustratingly, I notice today in researching that AMD is about to come out with a new socket to replace the 939 and which will support the faster DDR2 RAM. As always now I am considering whether to just wait a few months until these new boards stabilize and buy sometime in the fall.

Buying a system is a PAIN; we're always on the brink of something.

Still I think others may find this thread of use.

munsen: I was looking at exactly that board today. It seems to have gotten pretty good reviews.
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tiketti · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2003 Posts: 32 Location: Finland

Asus A8N-SLI Premium gets my vote too. I've been running new desktop system for a week or so, and so far everything is working like a charm.

My system specs for your reference:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium
AMD64X2 4800
Asus EN7900GTX
Kingston KVR400X64C3A/1G x 2
Antec NEO HE550 PSU
Antec ONE P180 case
Maxtor DiamondMAX10 250G SATA-II x 2
Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU cooler

System runs cool and quiet and is rock stable. It took very little time to install Gentoo from universal 2006.0 installation cd... and it didn't take too many hours to bootstrap and compile 'world' with new make.conf settings and optimizations.
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energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

look at my sig.

Oh, and yes, onboard NIC and sensors are working fine. onboard sound works too (but is pretty crappy).
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jellommmmmm · n00b Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 11

Here is my hardware that is currently running gentoo amd64:

Gigabyte Technologies k8u-939 motherboard, on board NIC sound and sata work fine. I haven't tried the on board sensors
Amd X2 3800+
Patriot 4 x 512 MB DDR 400 (2.5 cas supposively, in dual channel but I haven't really checked the timings)

This board supports AGP not PCIe. My GeForce 6200 works like a charm with nvidia drivers, despite its 64 bit memory bus.
If you don't want to mess with those little bitty slots, stick with PCI and get this board.

I had all kinds of crazy lost ticks and instability when I first setup this system. New BIOS and newer Kernel seem to have sorted this out, and now I don't have any kind of clock problem or instability issues. I like the layout of the board too, the air goes right down the RAM slots. Cool and quiet works fine. No hardware complains with my MB whatsoever.

m4rku5 · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2006 Posts: 29

Hi guys, im running Gentoo 2006.0 AMD64 (anything stable except wine) on a
* DFI NF4-Ultra-D
* Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester)
* Nvidia GeForce 6600

And have no problems except with the nvidia drivers (which might as well be caused by my PSU or an instable BIOS version)

Btw be sure to pick the new Marvell Yukon drivers for the gigE onboard nic.

So if you have any of theese components its pretty safe to run them with Gentoo.
Hope it helps someone.

Keruskerfuerst · Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 5:39 pm Post subject:

I have a MSI K8Neo Platinum (Nvidia nForce 3 250GB) and a AMD Athlon64 3200.
Two SATA HDDs from Samsung (SP1614C). I am using shielded SATA cables from Revoltec (http://www.revoltec.com). With the standart SATA cables, it seemed, that the HDD drives had some problems with reading and writing data. With the new cables, the drives do work perfectly.
Graphics card: Gainward FX5900XT (Nvidia)

The installation with the 2006.0 universal install CD went fine.

speeddemon · Apprentice Joined: 27 Sep 2003 Posts: 162