MSI K8N Neo Platinum: what to expect?

Message

Andysan · Post by **Andysan** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 1:39 pm

I don't know, the pc shutdown and won't going up again (nothing happens with another PSU)
The same happens then I plugged the PSU to another old pc. It was an older Enermax 330W.

Anyway:
The latest betabios patch (12A) for the K8N fixes the temperature-bug for newcastle processors.

p-Lo · Post by **p-Lo** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 5:52 pm

I recently decided to get the chaintech VNF3-250 based on the plain nForce-3 250, and besides the fact that my 2 SATA drives are named strangely (hde and hdg, the only hard drives in the system, and i only have 2 other drives, dvd and dvdrw) everything seems to work fine. Admittedly it has a separate realtek 10/100 ethernet built in, and i use an Audigy 2 ZS, but everything seemed to work fine. Except those drive letters took me a bit of trial and error to find during the install using fdisk.

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 9:13 pm

p-Lo wrote:Except those drive letters took me a bit of trial and error to find during the install using fdisk.

Code: Select all

ls /proc/ide

It's not strange because hda-hdd are allways taken up by the legacy ide0 and ide1.channels.

Clansman · Post by **Clansman** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 1:16 pm

p-Lo wrote:I recently decided to get the chaintech VNF3-250 based on the plain nForce-3 250, and besides the fact that my 2 SATA drives are named strangely (hde and hdg, the only hard drives in the system, and i only have 2 other drives, dvd and dvdrw) everything seems to work fine. Admittedly it has a separate realtek 10/100 ethernet built in, and i use an Audigy 2 ZS, but everything seemed to work fine. Except those drive letters took me a bit of trial and error to find during the install using fdisk.

that's not at all strange.

your 2 SATA channels are only the 2 standard master IDE channels (one master for primary interface and another for the secondary).
the SATA chips tend to be modified PATA designs (which is not bad), and that is why it's bios expects up to 4 drives. when both drives are connected, they're actually connected to the master channels.

hde and hdg are the master channels of a second ide interface card. since that is the second controller on your card, the other (the one where you have the optical drives connected to) has the devices hda-hdd.

i guess when the new SATA-300 appear, the chips and their bios' will be developed from scratch and this backwards feature goes away.

[]

p-Lo · Post by **p-Lo** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 12:09 am

cool, thanks for the insight, you learn something new everyday

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 5:13 am

p-Lo wrote:I recently decided to get the chaintech VNF3-250 based on the plain nForce-3 250, and besides the fact that my 2 SATA drives are named strangely (hde and hdg, the only hard drives in the system, and i only have 2 other drives, dvd and dvdrw) everything seems to work fine. Admittedly it has a separate realtek 10/100 ethernet built in, and i use an Audigy 2 ZS, but everything seemed to work fine. Except those drive letters took me a bit of trial and error to find during the install using fdisk.

If your drives are showing uo as HDX and HDY it is because they are using the pio driver which means it is the stock lib_ata. In other word slow as hell. You need to use the sata_nv driver.
try running hdparm to see the speed.
like this.

Code: Select all

hdparm -t /dev/hdx

it should be above 40 Mb/s

herring · Post by **herring** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 11:12 pm

MSI KN8 Platinum using the amd64-2004.1 minimal install iso.

I've tried disabling firewire, onboard sound and USB in BIOS, rmmod 'ing 3 (possible conflicting) firewire related modules prior to

modprobe forcedeth
net-setup eth0
or
/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart

to no avail. Module loads without errors, but it does not detect onboard NIC.
ifconfig shows only lo
Any suggestions ?

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 5:12 am

Did you boot the SMP kernel? it may have a newer vesion of forcedeth.
If that does not work you will need to drop in an pci lan card. for the install, then patch a kernel with the latest foredeth. From HERE

Mr Grebo · Post by **Mr Grebo** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 1:44 pm

herring wrote:MSI KN8 Platinum using the amd64-2004.1 minimal install iso.

Any suggestions ?

I have an MSI K8N and could not get the onboard ethernet detected at all during installation. I threw in a PCI NIC which was detected first time, and I am still using it since I don't need gig ethernet and the NIC is working just fine for me.

I have had no joy with the onboard sound at all. It is not detected during boot and I am seriously considering picking up a cheapish SoundBlaster card, which by all accounts won't give me any problems. Does anyone have any advice to getting the onboard sound working on this board?

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 5:51 pm

Why would you expect the gigabit to work when there is no driver for it in the livecd's kernel....?

The driver is being developed here.

I can't be bothered to try the patch because it's not compatible with gentoo-dev-sources and I need my bootsplash, etc.

Although... would it be possible to get the latest bk sources from kernel.org, apply the gigabit patch, compile it as a module, and then load that module with a gentoo-dev-sources kernel?

herring · Post by **herring** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 6:29 pm

Gherald wrote:Why would you expect the gigabit to work when there is no driver for it in the livecd's kernel....?

Well forcedeth is in the kernel (amd64-2004.1 & gcc34-amd64-2004.2-test iso's), at least as modprob'able module (v 0.25), but for now it isn't mature enough to detect (100/1000 capable) built-in NIC in "nforce3-250Gb"-chips.

I had to use a PCI addon NIC myself to install 64-bit version of gentoo.

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 8:19 pm

Forcedeth is in the kernel, yes. But without the gigabit patch. So there is no way it is going to detect your onchip nforce3 network.

I currently use PCI NICs as well, and will probably do so until kernel 2.6.8 brings "experimental" gigabit support.

Gelfling · Post by **Gelfling** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:53 am

I have a MSI K8T Neo with a 3200+, my biggest annoyance is that the HD led doesn't light during disk activity on my SATA Raid 0 Raptors connected to the VIA SATA chipset. Could anybody tell me if the MSI K8N Neo/Neo2 suffers from this same defect?

Clansman · Post by **Clansman** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:56 am

doesn't that board have another NIC besides the on-chip nvidia one? if so, it is probably a gigabit marvel one.

[EDIT: with known drivers in the kernel]

[]

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 8:23 am

The K8T has on onboard (not onchip!) Realtek 8110S GbE. That is it.

By the way, the K8N is now on sale:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 13-130-457

Best socket 754 board on the market.

Drk korrupted · Post by **Drk korrupted** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 11:04 am

I ordered one of these (K8N Neo Platinum) this week and my 3200+ 1MB L2 should be here soon as well...I am hoping that I won't encounter too many problems but it looks like I am going to have to find a NIC to borrow from someone or dig through my closet.

Is it difficult to install Gentoo to a WD SATA Raptor with this board? I have not owned a SATA drive yet and have little experience with them and definately no experience with them in Gentoo, and also will be receiving one this week and would like that to be my system disk if possible. Is the SATA controller on this mobo a hardware controller? Will it be much slower if it is not?

Additionally, a few perhaps n00bish questions if you will (if my questions already haven't been

)....what is all this talk about using the gentoo software raid instead of hardware raid? Wouldn't you want raid to be handled by hardware? Also, what is the difference between onboard and onchip? Does onchip just mean that a feature is just built into the northbridge?

Lastly, how does the onboard sound in windows, if anyone has actually used this board in windows? I've read reviews say it sounds alright, but I am planning on an M-Audio Revolution here in the next week, so I guess I'll manage, but I was just curious anyways. Good luck getting all the things on this board working, and I will definately be glad to give input on my experiences with Gentoo and this board later this week

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 11:14 am

From what i could see in the 2.6.8-rc1 change log forcedeth gigabit support has not been merged yet.

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:13 pm

Drk korrupted wrote:I ordered one of these (K8N Neo Platinum) this week and my 3200+ 1MB L2 should be here soon as well...I am hoping that I won't encounter too many problems but it looks like I am going to have to find a NIC to borrow from someone or dig through my closet.

Yep.

Is it difficult to install Gentoo to a WD SATA Raptor with this board? I have not owned a SATA drive yet and have little experience with them and definately no experience with them in Gentoo, and also will be receiving one this week and would like that to be my system disk if possible. Is the SATA controller on this mobo a hardware controller? Will it be much slower if it is not?

No, it is very easy and will be detected as hde or hdg. Just be sure you compile nvidia sata support into your kernel. The controller is hardware, yes. I don't think there's any such thing as a "software controller."

Additionally, a few perhaps n00bish questions if you will (if my questions already haven't been )....what is all this talk about using the gentoo software raid instead of hardware raid? Wouldn't you want raid to be handled by hardware? Also, what is the difference between onboard and onchip? Does onchip just mean that a feature is just built into the northbridge?

In most cases the linux software raid performs as well as hardware.
True hardware raid is actually fairly hard to come by, the nforce 250 motherboards like the K8N are some of the few I know that have it. Many will have some type of raid onboard, such as the cheap Sil 3112s, but these are actually software raids because they depend on the processor. Mostly only useful for raiding windows system drives, since it can't boot from a raid otherwise.

A linux software raid is easier to setup than getting something like the Sil driver to work, and also more flexible. For example, I love the fact that it can be per partition, rather than per drive. So you can raid1 your root / and /boot and important parts of /home but raid0 things like /opt, /var, /usr/portage/distfiles.... (symlinks is probably the way to go).

By the way I've been trying to figure out which parts of var are more suited to a raid0 and which parts should be on a raid1... anyone have some insight?

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:25 pm

blueworm wrote:From what i could see in the 2.6.8-rc1 change log forcedeth gigabit support has not been merged yet.

That's ok, at least the gigabit patch should work with gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.8 which will makes things simpler.

Perhaps the devs would even consider integrating it as EXPERIMENTAL. It'd sure make things more convenient and *shouldn't* affect non-gigabit forcedeth users.

n3x · Post by **n3x** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:05 pm

Thought I'd bring this back to life - has anyone gotten a livecd to work successfully with the neo platinum's SATA ? I've been having lots of difficulty.

Cheers,
james

Andysan · Post by **Andysan** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:17 pm

In the latest kernel 2.6.8-rc1->2.6.8-rc2 forcedepth gigabit support have been merged at least

n3x · Post by **n3x** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:19 pm

Okay - but is there a livecd with 2.6.8 on it?

StefSybo · Post by **StefSybo** » Thu Jul 29, 2004 7:43 am

No, there isn't any live-cd or distro yet with kernel 2.6.8, in fact the stable 2.6.8 hasn't been released yet. The latest version is 2.6.8-rc2, which is the first kernel with gigabit support built-in.
The first distro with 2.6.8-rc2 will probably be mandrake 10.1-beta1, which will be released tomorrow. The alpha-version which was released last week had 2.6.8-rc1, so I guess the beta-version will have 2.6.8-rc2

n3x · Post by **n3x** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:41 pm

So without a livecd with support for nvidia sata, how is anyone installing on this board?

cheers,
james

WonderClown · Post by **WonderClown** » Sat Jul 31, 2004 2:27 am

I just successfully installed on this mobo with the 2004.2 LiveCD. My SATA drives were detected just fine, but I had to "modprobe ide-disk" (as mentioned in the amd64 technotes) in order to be able to access them. After that, things were fine -- except when I tried to use LVM, I discovered that LVM and devfs do not mix, at least not on amd64. (I installed the system, switched to udev, and then converted my volumes to LVM, which works fine.)

Also, I needed to stick in a PCI Ethernet card, since the onboard LAN does not work with 2.6.7.