# Help me upgrade to a linux friendly computer

## El_Presidente_Pufferfish

I'm looking to replacemy broken Iwill KK266+R but im worried that the newer motherboards arent supported well under linux

would a KT333 motherboard work well?

And can anybody recommend a good KT333 motherboard thats cheap

I'm lookin at the shuttle ak32gtr or whatnot

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## rommel

well i dont know about cheap...but giga-byte makes a kt333 board that has built in ethernet , sound blaster sound , and promise ata 133 controller that can be used as just two additional normal ide channels by setting it to ata133 instead of RAID in the bios...i have installed gentoo on this board for someone and it worked very well...i used the promise ata133 controllers to set up linux software RAID 0 and had a DVD player and CDRW on the via controller.

GA-7VRXP is the model number and newegg has em for 103.00

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## taskara

I agree - tho the gigabyte has generated slightly lower benchmark results than say Asus or Abit or MSI, it has also been around the longest, which SHOULD mean it has more bios updates for stability.

it is also cheap compared to the others, and I agree with Rommels other points.

btw the kt333 works better under linux than a kt266  :Smile: 

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## Carlos

I don't know much about hardware, but my K7VTA3 from ECS is working swimmingly, and it's a KT333 board.

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## elzbal

For what it's worth, my MSI Ultra2 (non-raid) works fine with Gentoo 1.4/Kernel 2.4.19.

It didn't do so hot with Gentoo 1.2/Kernel 2.4.18, though - the kernel did not correctly detect that it could use DMA, so hard drive access was slooooow (slower than network drives).

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## taskara

if the kernel doesn't detect your dma settings properly, just correct them yourself to gain the extra speed  :Smile: 

I think atm kt400 chipsets are the way to go - you will get serial ata, agp8x (for raedon 9700 and newer, and also the newer nvidia cards) etc..

I wouldn't buy a kt333 unless it was a lot cheaper.

the only other board I would consider going is an nforce2 - but they won't be out for a while yet - and they have poor linux support because nvidia close their drivers.

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