[CLUE-Tech] Motherboard Recommendations

[Mike Staver]

Well, I'll throw in my 2 cents here - ABIT makes very good AMD based 
motherboards in my opinion.  I've had ASUS boards before, and not that 
they were bad, but I find the extras that come with ABIT to be well worth 
the few extra bucks.  I don't think "being linux compatible" will be an 
issue.  Every motherboard I have purchased over the last 6 years has 
worked with a stock linux distro or kernel.  If I were building a new 
system right now, this is what I would buy from www.mwave.com:

MSI K7N415 PRO NVIDIA nFORCE 415D CHIPSET ULTRA ATA100 ATX FORM FACTOR 
1xAGP(4X)/5xPCI/1xCNR/3xDDR W/ LAN & AUDIO Detail Specs (CPU TYPE:AMD 
DURON, ATHLON) $93.28

Why MSI instead of ABIT?  Well, I couldn't find any ABIT nForce 
motherboards.  The nforce motherboards are the best out there for Athlons 
right now because of one thing - dual channel DDR, and that makes a huge 
difference in performance.  What you would really want is an nForce 2 
board, but those will cost a lot more.  For example, if I had the money to 
burn, I would own this board:

ASUS A7N8X DLX NVIDIA nFORCE2 CHIPSET ULTRA ATA133 ATX FORM FACTOR 
1xAGP(PRO)/5xPCI/3xDDR W/SATA, DUAL LAN, 1394, USB 2.0 & AUDIO Detail 
Specs (NO STOCK - Estimate arrival on 11/29/02)  $145.12

Serial ATA, ATA133, dual channel DDR, 333 FSB, what more could you want??

As far as linux goes... I don't see why it wouldn't run on this system.  
Granted, they are new boards and chipsets, but from what I understand, it 
runs on the original nforce, so it should run fine on nforce2 - and if it 
didn't work flawlessly now, you know it will in a few weeks when someone 
fixes it :)  If you don't want to go for nforce, then I can promise you 
that any motherboard based on these chipsets work awesome because I have 
tried them:

VIA KT133
VIA KT266
VIA KT266A
VIA KT333

Obviously, a KT333 coupled with a new athlon XP 2800+ with a FSB of 333 
would be quite impressive. 

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Matt Gushee wrote:

> Hi, Folks--
> 
> Well, I thought I was helping somebody with a fairly routine Linux
> installation, and I've ended up getting roped into helping him find a
> new motherboard ... which is a bit beyond my expertise: I generally
> don't pay a whole lot of attention to hardware, and I've never bought a
> motherboard, period; I guess it's mainly because I have a working
> Internet connection.
> 
> Anyway, the priorities are reliability and support; performance is
> definitely secondary. The gentleman thinks highly of ASUS products,
> though he's not dead set on the brand. One product that I thought looked
> good is the Asus A7V333 ... but I can't find any information on how well
> it works with Linux. In fact, overall I'm finding that there are almost
> no motherboards that 1) are currently available, 2) have been reviewed
> by sources that I believe to be trustworthy, and 3) are reported to work
> well with Linux. So I'm at a loss here.
> 
> Anybody out there have experience with recent motherboards? I'd
> appreciate your recommendations.
> 
> 

-- 
				-Mike Staver
				 staver at fimble.com
                                 mstaver at globaltaxnetwork.com
				 http://www.fimble.com/staver