# Nforce4?

## qtothemax

I'm planning on building myself an nforce4 system in the near future (as soon as a sub $200 board is in stock somewhere).  I'v heard a lot of complaints about SATA not working.  Would it be a wise move to just get a PATA drive and let the SATA wait until later when driver issues are ironed out, or have these issues already been worked around?  

Anyone have any idea which boards are looking good?  The upcoming DFI board based on the nf4 ultra looks promising, but I'm not sure if the karajan audio module is supported.  Its a realek ALC850 chip, which i believe is AC97, so will a generic AC97 ALSA driver work for that?  I'v only configured kernels for my very non bleeding edge P3 900 laptop where everything is supported, and am not real sure what to look for as far as linux compatability on new hardware.  

The DFI's specs are here: http://www.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_product_spec_details_r_us.jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3471&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP&SITE=US

Someone please take a look at that and see if there are any major linux support issues, or feel free to recomend any other boards (under $200, I'm not planning on ever needing SLI, and don't want to pay for it) that are known to work well under linux.

Thanks in advance.

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## qtothemax

I guess while i'm at it I might as well list my complete system to get your input on that.  I think its pretty solid.

Cooler Master Centurion 5 case w/350 watt PS.  I don't think that 20 pin 350 is going to work, so i'm going to replace it with a Cooler Master 450 atx 2.0 Model "RS-450-ACLY" that should have pleanty of power and has a native 24 pin connector that the nforce4 wants.

Leadtek 6600gt.  It is supposed to be quiet and does not have the HSF mounting problems that other manufaturers have, according to anandtech.com

Athlon 64 3200+ 90nm

2X512mb PDP 2-2-2 ddr400

Seagate 7200.8 200GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ Hard Drive if I decide to go SATA.  Otherwise i'm probably pick up a cheap PATA with a rebate at best buy or circuit city.

NEC 3520A dual layer DVD burner.  DVD burners are all treated the same when it comes to driver support, right?  I'm not planning on using the dual layer feature any time soon, so thats ok if that part is not supported.

Thermaltake silent  boost HSF with arctic silver 5.

I don't think there are any linux driver issues with that, but if you see any let me know.

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## Gelfling

I put together a system with the following:

MSI RS480M2-IL (ATI Xpress 200 chipset)

MSI NX6600GT PCI-E 

512MB SDRAM

Audigy2 ZS gamer

NEC ND-3500AG DVD+/-RW

Seagate SATA 160GB HD

A64 3500+ cpu w/Zalman CNPS-7000-cu HSF

Antec Aria case

I can't get Gentoo 2004.3 32-bit or the 64-bit distro to work on this system. I've tried Knoppix 3.6, Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora Core 3 with dismal results. right now I'm stuck with XP Pro until there's support in the kernel for this motherboard.

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## paulisdead

The ALC850 chips on the nforce boards are supported by the i8x0 driver.

I've played with the Asus A8N-SLI, the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI, and the MSI Neo4 SLI, and the only one that put a smile on my face is the Neo4.  The only problem with the neo4 sli is that the onboard SB Live! 24bit doesn't work in linux, or at least I wasn't able to get it going with either the ca0106 or emu10k1 drivers, so I picked up a used audigy 1 for $25.  The Neo4 ultra doesn't have the SBLive! 24bit, though so it should use the alc850 chip.  Neo4 ultra will also let you do SLI in the 4x PCI-E slot, though I can't guarantee nvidia won't kill support for that with their drivers.

The A8N-SLI has problems with losing the sata drives and NIC's not working for long periods of time.  My friend also had a problem where it'd take about 20 tries to get it to bootup.  The Northbridge fan on the A8N will also most likely be the loudest thing in your box.  The first K8NXP-SLI had bad usb ports and the NICs died on me, the second one the NIC's died on me within a few hours, 2 of the USB ports were flaky, and I'd get cmos checksum errors on bootup and sometimes linux and windows wouldn't bootup on them.  The MSI neo4 has none of these problems.

I'm running a 3200 @ 2.55ghz, with 1GB OCZ Platinum rev2 pc3200 @ 2.5-3-3-10 510DDR, with 2 6800gts (still waiting on sli drivers for linux though).  I've been very very happy with this setup.

BTW, the neo4 can also overclock video cards from inside the bios.  If you go into their cell menu, and press shift-F2 alt-f3, some extra options will pop up for oc'ing your video card.  Might take a few tries to get it to pop up.  Same with the gigabyte, but it's ctrl-f1 at the main menu and then go into the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker option.  

I work in a computer store so I can always bring stuff back if I'm not happy with it, or trade in my old stuff for current market value, so I get to upgrade a lot and tinker with all sorts of fun stuff, which is my only compensation since I get paid jack.

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## fourhead

I have a MSI K8N Neo4 (nForce4) board with S-ATA HD and everything is working fine: Sound, network, USB, Firewire ... no problems at all. nForce is the best supported chipset in Linux imo, I'd NEVER go anything ATI-like on Linux their support just really, really sucks.

Tom

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## xxxx

The same mb but I have problems:

- sound works

- sata maybe not (not tested but not found driver in kernel)

- very slow PATA (under windows too - maybe hw error), half speed of nforce2, under windows too

- lan works.

- pci-e not tested

- dvdrw works

- no driver support 4 onboard vga expect vesa (without dga and overlay  :Smile: )

- firewire not tested

- usb works

- clock runs faster then IRL (about twice  :Smile: ), hw or driver but the same with knoppix and not really ok under windows

 *Gelfling wrote:*   

> I put together a system with the following:
> 
> MSI RS480M2-IL (ATI Xpress 200 chipset)
> 
> MSI NX6600GT PCI-E 
> ...

 

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