MSI K8N Neo Platinum: what to expect?

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Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Tue May 25, 2004 11:32 am

OK, my new A64-system is on it's way. The MoBo of my choice is MSI K8N Neo Platinum with nForce3 250GB chipset and Realtek ALC850 integrated sound.

Now that the basics have been covered: Does anyone here have any experienses with this setup? Does the integrated sound work in Linux? what about the chipset? I know that there are drivers available from NVIDIA, but do they work? What about the integrated Gigabit NIC?

Basically, any hints and pointers are more than welcome

.

rawoul · Post by **rawoul** » Tue May 25, 2004 12:09 pm

I think Nforce motherboards are not the best choice for linux. The drivers seems to work ok now, but still the integrated sound drivers are a pain under linux (you have to use software emulation in alsa to use multiple channels). I would rather buy an ASUS k8V pro with an sb live or an Audigy sound card.

Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Tue May 25, 2004 12:14 pm

raoul wrote:I think Nforce motherboards are not the best choice for linux. The drivers seems to work ok now, but still the integrated sound drivers are a pain under linux (you have to use software emulation in alsa to use multiple channels). I would rather buy an ASUS k8V pro with an sb live or an Audigy sound card.

Neo Platinum is the best MoBo for A64 right now, that is why I bought it. It has realy working AGP/PCI-locking, which means that you can do some serious overclocking. And, AFAIK it's the only MoBo where you can use all three DIMM-slots and still use aggressive mem-timings, which is fine with me, since I'll be using it with three 512MB RAM-sticks. And I bet K8V with Audigy costs quite alot more than Neo Platinum does

.

Lv · Post by Lv » Tue May 25, 2004 4:32 pm

i have no faith in MSI whatsoever. i have an msi k8t neo on the floor in a corner. it's a piece of crap, not even worth using. however, if this new board is nforce based, then perhaps it wont be as bad. still, the only reason i dont beat the shit out of this board with a bat is that it was so damn expensive.

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Tue May 25, 2004 4:54 pm

I am curious to see if the nforce3 250 SATA works in linux?

Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Tue May 25, 2004 5:08 pm

blueworm wrote:I am curious to see if the nforce3 250 SATA works in linux?

I guess we'll find out soon enough

. I'll keep you posted.

Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Wed May 26, 2004 9:31 am

Neo Platinum is not available yet, so I went with MSI FIS2R instead.

Kai Hvatum · Post by **Kai Hvatum** » Wed May 26, 2004 7:55 pm

I have a MSI K8T NEO FSRII, it's a nice board and does as described. The back panel LED indicators save alot of time when troubleshooting, I got some bad ram from Newegg the first time that I sent back, the second DIMM worked perfectly. I don't know what anyone would think is so bad with the board, it's been great for me! (The onboard audio sucks major though, I'd recommend a Terratec card instead). The SATA works perfectly, I've got it set up in a software raid 1 array, skip the onbord raid controller, it's a POS and does exactly what linux software raid can do with alot more hassle.

If you really want RAID then just go Pro and get a 3ware card, great support, on the fly drive addition, great linux drivers....

p-Lo · Post by **p-Lo** » Mon Jun 07, 2004 2:27 am

Hey now that this board is actually available (the MSI board based on the n-force 3 250GB) I'm really considering it, but I'm wondering/worried does anyone know about linux support for the gigabit networking built into the chipset?

p-Lo · Post by **p-Lo** » Mon Jun 07, 2004 3:26 am

Actually I managed to answer my own question a bit, and offer some advice for others:

nVidia provides kernel patches and compilable modules to support the various features of its nforce3 chipset on amd64 (although at this time I have no idea bout their quality) including the chipset based ethernet.

I guess you would have to be prepared with the nvidia module source code and the latest kernel source code on a flash usb drive or something so you could compile your kernel yourself to be able to set up/use networking/internet.

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Mon Jun 07, 2004 11:12 am

p-Lo wrote:Actually I managed to answer my own question a bit, and offer some advice for others:

nVidia provides kernel patches and compilable modules to support the various features of its nforce3 chipset on amd64 (although at this time I have no idea bout their quality) including the chipset based ethernet.

I guess you would have to be prepared with the nvidia module source code and the latest kernel source code on a flash usb drive or something so you could compile your kernel yourself to be able to set up/use networking/internet.

This is not exactly true. AFAIK Nvidia provide drivers for 2.4 kernels.
There are no Gigabit drivers yet and nforce SATA is most probably unsopporterd also.
Basically Nvidia provides nothing that is´nt allready in the 2.6 kernel tree.

icwhiting · Post by **icwhiting** » Mon Jun 07, 2004 4:01 pm

The onboard audio is really bad, you include it when building the kernel under the OSS as a VIA. When being used under KDE you have to turn the volume right up and you hear cracking sounds whilst it is playing (very poor).

I am considering getting one of the Creative Labs cards which have excellent support under linux.

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Mon Jun 07, 2004 4:12 pm

What are you refering too, nforce3 audio or via audio?
From my experience the sound quality on nforce2 boards is excellent.
IMHO better than SBLive5.1 They just are unable to handle hardware mixing, due to available drivers.
As far as via onboard sound goes, YES its crap.

p-Lo · Post by **p-Lo** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:13 pm

Thanks for the feedback on the support, i checked the nvidia drivers page and your right they're for the 2.4 series. I think now I'd rather get the cheaper Chaintech board based on the plain nForce 3 250, but you mentioned serial ATA drivers and I realise that's something else I'm going to have to look into...

molander · Post by **molander** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 3:03 pm

I bought the Gigabyte K8NPro which is an nforce3 chipset. Everything on the board works - sound-eth-SATA(Sil 3112 i think)-PATA. I am happy with its performance and its stability thus far. I havent havent any hard lockups and 64bit mode works pretty well. The amd64 bootcd detected everything with no problems. The 32 bit bootcd was a little more interesting as I had to use the smp kernel and turn off apic to get the SATA controller to work.

I am currently just running a 32 bit env right now because of software availability. I use a raptor75 as my boot drive, with that the box flies. Compiled openoffice in ~3.5 hours.

Gelfling · Post by **Gelfling** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 2:09 am

molander wrote:I bought the Gigabyte K8NPro which is an nforce3 chipset. Everything on the board works - sound-eth-SATA(Sil 3112 i think)-PATA. I am happy with its performance and its stability thus far. I havent havent any hard lockups and 64bit mode works pretty well. The amd64 bootcd detected everything with no problems. The 32 bit bootcd was a little more interesting as I had to use the smp kernel and turn off apic to get the SATA controller to work.

I am currently just running a 32 bit env right now because of software availability. I use a raptor75 as my boot drive, with that the box flies. Compiled openoffice in ~3.5 hours.

Is this the 250Gb version? I looked at one their mb's and they didn't follow Nvidia's design for 250Gb mb's, they used a different sound chip and only provided 2 native SATA connectors instead of 4.

molander · Post by **molander** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 3:54 pm

No its not the nforce3 250. I bought K8NPro in feb when the 150 was only available. It does only have 2 SATA. As for the sound though, I dont care what it is as long as it works and sounds good which it does. Same goes for the eth. USB, USB2 and firewire which also work. I would have liked to get the 250 but the timeframe didnt match.

Linux compatibility is a must as it is my primary OS for work and play. So I will take compatibility over performance usually. But that just basically means I have to buy 2-3 month old boards so that they are fully supported.

You may want to wait until the chipset is developed more. From personal experience (as a computer assembler) the only motherboards I trust are Asus, Gigabyte, Epox and Tyan. Not to say other manufacters dont make good boards, its just that those 4 typically dont make bad ones. I do think nforce3 is the way to go. It runs very well for me.

Just my opinion(s) though. =)

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 1:42 am

I am posting from an MSI K8N 250gb running kernel 2.6.7, xorg, and windowmaker.

I haven't bothered to try the kernel patch for the onchip gigabit (am using a PCI NIC for now) but I hear it will be in 2.6.8

Everything else seems to be working fine, including SATA.

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 5:59 am

Gherald wrote:I haven't bothered to try the kernel patch for the onchip gigabit (am using a PCI NIC for now) but I hear it will be in 2.6.8

I think you should try it and give some feedback to the developers.
There are not to many nf3-250Gb floating around maybe yours and a few more.

Andysan · Post by **Andysan** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 2:19 pm

I have the Epox 8KDA3+ with nforce 3 250GB and tried the "try2" gigabit patch, except dhcp it seems to work more or less (could open a website from the local webserver). I will try the new "try19" patch as soon as I compiled the new kernel.

The nf3-250 sata seems to work too, but i cant test it because I haven't a sata drive:
NFORCE3-250-SATA: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:0a.0
NFORCE3-250-SATA: chipset revision 162
NFORCE3-250-SATA: 0000:00:0a.0 (rev a2) UDMA133 controller
NFORCE3-250-SATA: 100% native mode on irq 11

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 3:12 pm

Please write to carl-daniel Hailfinger with some feedback once you have tried forecedeth try 19.
Andysan you you post the results of.

Code: Select all

hdparm -tT /dev/sdX

Another question I have about the epox.
Does the CPU cradle have the 2 holes going thru the mainboard?
What cooling solution do you have on it?

Gherald2 · Post by **Gherald2** » Tue Jun 29, 2004 12:17 am

I could probably give some useful feedback as I have two MSI K8N Platinums as well as four other systems with gigabit.

But I've never manually patched my kernel before... any pointers?

I was trying to follow this guide: http://www.linuxhq.com/patch-howto.html

so from /usr/src I tried:

Code: Select all

patch -p0 < forcedeth_gigabit_try19.txt

but kept having to type in /linux/drivers/net/<filename> manually... and then I got hunk errors on a few and then it asked about assuming -R for reverse, which doesn't sound right....

Will this patch work with gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.7-r6 or do I need a vanilla kernel?

Btw what's the best way to benchmark network throughput? netperf?

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Tue Jun 29, 2004 1:22 am

to patch kernel like this:

Code: Select all

patch -Np1 -i <PATH_TO_PATCH>

I give you an example supposing you have the patch file in your home dir.

Code: Select all

cd linux-2.6.7-bk11
patch -Np1 -i ~/forcedeth_gigabit_try19.txt
make mrproper

As far as benchmarking the net goes I have no idea.

Andysan · Post by **Andysan** » Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:44 pm

@blueworm
I'am sorry, but my power supply burned the epox mb, I replaced it with a msi k8n neo platinum, but yet without gentoo.

At least I wrote a bugreport to c-dh about the latest forcedeth 19 patch, it works good with some glitches.

But with the k8n I'am not very happy, it has problems with my newcastle-processor (too high temperature and not fully functional c&q)

blueworm · Post by **blueworm** » Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:55 pm

Damm how did it burn? do you have any idea why? what PSU where you using?

MSI K8N Neo Platinum: what to expect?

MSI K8N Neo Platinum: what to expect?

It's a nice board.

Onboard Audio on the MSI board