# What athlon64 Motherboard? nForce3 any good under linux

## secondshadow

I was thinking about the MSI-K8T800-Neo...but I was curious as to what the nForce3 support under linux was like as this information might change my purchase...maybe. There is a bit of a deadline though. As soon as my check goes through tonight I'm placing my order, which means probably around 8am towmorrow. YAY FOR NEW TOYS! Yes I know there are a couple of threads about this but they didn't really answer my question, or at least not the ones I read through. Also, any motherboard suggestions are welcome.

EDIT:

PS: Don't recommend Suttle though...I've had too many issues with their products, everything from getting pairs of bad motherboards (yep...ordered two at the same time for me and my grandfather and they were BOTH bad) to the stupid things just not playing nicely with any NIC other than its built-in one....really irritating.

EDIT:

Oh yeah and overclocking features, while not required, would be nice... :Smile: 

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## camouflageX

Well, I have the MSI K8T Neo which works really great under Gentoo-amd64. For me it is very fast and stable and all features work.

Why not come to #gentoo-amd64 on irc.freenode.net. There we already have a little Gentoo-amd64 community and we always welcome new users.  :Smile: 

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## secondshadow

Sound like my gut instincts were right about the motherboard. Does cool and quiet work under linux yet, just as a matter of curiousness? Not that its a big deal, but it would be nice for my computer to be nearly silent while idling. :Smile: 

You'll probably see me there by this tuesday in IRC (so long as I can get it to work properly...I've had issues with IRC and my network on occasion....  :Evil or Very Mad:  ).  I'm having the stuff sent FedEx Next Day because I just can't wait!  :Smile:  $27 for shipping, but its worth it.

Going to check my bank balance right now and then to place my order. My bank better not have screwed up this time 'cause I swear I'll go up there and raise hell....and switch banks now that theres a Chevy Chase and Bank of America right around the corner...YAY FOR NEW MALLS Well...3 year old malls anyway  :Smile: 

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## camouflageX

Hehe.. I hate waiting, too! I couldn't wait either...

IRC on freenode shouldn't be a problem with a router if that's your problem. Cool & Quiet works AFAIK, but I haven't tried it yet.

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## Gelfling

I almost went with an Athlon64 today, only problem was I couldn't decide between getting the Abit K8V-Max3 or the Chaintech Nforce3 motherboard. I was at a Marketpro Computer show and there were only 2 vendors that had each motherboard. One vendor had a combo Abit mb & Athlon64 3200+ for $445 ($390 for mb & 3000+) and the other vendor had the Chaintech mb & 3000+ for $415, I forget the price with a 3200+. I hadn't done enough to research so I didn't want to just make a snap decision and buy something on impulse. The one thing I was aware of was that the Chaintech used the VIA Envy24HT audio chipset wasn't supported in linux. I can always use my Audigy...

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## secondshadow

I ended up going with the MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R. It looks to basically be just an updated version of the K8T NEO-FSR. The biggest difference seems to me to be the fact that the 2R looks to have support for a pair of drives in an UltraATA RAID, which the original does not. Not something I care about at the moment, but still. Well, that and the built-in pair of IEEE 1394 ports, which is kinda nice. Don't have much that uses them but it means that I don't have to rely on the Audigy for them when I finally ditch it. I was actually planning on continuing to use my Audigy for sound right now as I'm never terribly impressed by onboard sound chipsets. The audigy appears to work okay in linux via ALSA...though the sound is a bit laggy....this, however, has been attributed to aRts. Speaking on the topic of audio devices, anyone have any recommendations on an Audigy replacement. I don't much like Creatives support, or lack thereof, considering that they have almost non-existant support even for windows, not to mention the negative levels of support they have for linux.

After that all I need is for ATi to release Radeon9700 drivers for x86-64 so that I can have an accelerated X....and then some 64->32->64 compatability libraries and I'll be all set....not gonna hold my breath on those libs though. If nVidia beats 'em to it I might end up going back with them. This is the first ATi card I've ever owned and while I will say the card itself is great I don't really feel like they care as much as far as drivers, especially for linux, as nVidia does. But thats just my $0.02 on that.

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## crazycat

Well , audigy is a emu10k1 card and the cards on this chip are famous for its performance and quality/price rating (sb pci 512). And u dont have to deal with creative's "support" anyway, or where do u expet it to see?  :Very Happy: 

Theese cards are pretty good supported in linux and even in windows u can always use kX driver if u make music and want low latency. The only thing to worry about is warranty, but i've got my audigy for more than 2 years and never had *any* problems with it. If i were u I would not think that way about one of the best cards avaible, just think of an alternative of  gettin another one  buggy via crap to work. If u have emu10k1 card u can also use OpenAL hardware accelerated. But there are lots of alternatives out there  :Smile:  Anyway , i have a great imression of my audigy (the card i had befor  was sb live and befor aureal vortex).

Maybe i didnt understand what do u meant by "support" but OpenAL is pretty often updated and the drivers work pretty good, so i dont see any reason of changing card just because of creative has bad image.

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## secondshadow

by support I mean a complete and utter lack of driver updates from them when their drivers break things to begin with. I also don't really agree with some of their less well known practices like installing spyware on thier users machines (NewsUPD anyone...SBLive! days). And I'm by no means saying that its a bad card. Not at all. If I'd thought creative's products were horrible I wouldn't've been using them since the old SoundBlaster 16 ISA cards were out (Vibra16). There are just a lot of alternatives now and I actually have had issues, even in windows, that took them forever to fix because they release driver updates fairly infrequently. Oddly enough, I've had fewer problems getting the stupid thing to play nice in linux than I have in windows. I've actually had the Audigy drivers make the system innoperable once in windows. Only once, but once is one time too many. And I can confirm that it was the drivers/installation thereof because the sound stuff is always the 2nd thing I install when fresh-installing windows (video is the first). As for ditching it for that onboard sound...are you nuts? Like I said before, I'm never very impressed by onboard sound offerings. Its why I own an Audigy, and why I owned an SBLive! before that. I just think that with all of the alternatives out there tese days with sound hardware, much of it actually getting very good reviews and some better than the Creative stuff gets, it warrents some checking out.

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## secondshadow

Alrighty, now I want to get a little bit of pretoratory information before I get my stuff. First off, will the 32-bit lilo boot the AMD64 gentoo okay, or do I need to use the grub static thing? I ask mostly because the ultimate goal right now is to install an Athlon64 linux for general use and keep a stripped down 32-bit around for gaming (X, fluxbox, video drivers. Thats about it). The reason why I ask about lilo specifically is that I really hate setting up grub. For me, lilo is just easier and its what I'm used to, though I will use grub if I have to   :Rolling Eyes:  .

Please, if I simply missed the answers to these questions in a doc somewhere point me to it.

Also, I'm guess I should be using the 2004 gentoo instead of 1.4 for the install?

Next: I read that devfs is supposed to be causing problems with athlon64's in the 2.4 kernels. Does this extend to the 2.6 kernel? If so, or even if not, should I do some reading on udev instead?

Next I'm sure this one will get answered when I start installing, but since I'm asking anyway, is there a certain GCC I should be looking at using? If so, what -march/-mcpu should I be using as I read that anything pre-3.4 will fail using k8. How does one generate 64-bit code with 3.3? Also, should I be setting the CHOST to something specific?

nptl: Should I give it a shot, or no?

Does KDE still not work? This would make me sad  :Sad: 

Anything else glarring that I should be prepared for?

I'm really looking forward to watching a kernel compile in like 10 minutes or less. I think the 2.6 in my current (rather lazyily bloated) configuration from the last time I built it too like 20 minutes  :Twisted Evil: 

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## crazycat

Well , i can only give u an answer on only few questions:

u dont have to use any march at all, cause there is only one amd64 arch atm. I only used optimization cflags "-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" and so on. KDE 3.2 is unmasked and working pretty sable(also k3b). I also used nptl in use flags and didnt encounter any problems. I dont know if lilo works because i find gub much easier (i always forget to run lilo after changing configuration). I think grub is better because u can change boot settings in at runtime in grub menu, witch is pretty usefull if u have forgot to place "root=" parameter  :Very Happy:  (grub has a little command interpreter build in) U can even install it anywhere else without booting something else. 

As of livecd, u should use 2004. The greatet problem for me is that i  am not able to use 32 bit opengl acceleration with amd64 linux. OO wouldn't compile too , someone said u have use -sandbox mode. And i have absolutely no problems running 32bit software, such as opera.

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## secondshadow

Well, as to forgetting to re-run lilo, every once in a great while I forget to do this, though lately I've been doing 'make install' as a final kernel step which runs it for you...or rather asks if it should. Trick is that I have a kernel lying about in /boot which I simply call "vmlinuz-generic". This is usually the first kernel I build on a system which lacks a lot of the fine tuning that I do later on and typically is built with either gentoo-sources (though not the latest 2.4's as they give my computer HUGE problems....have to mask 2.4.22) or vanilla sources and when I'm doing this on a computer that ISN'T mine it is usually a mirror of the .config for the liveCD kernel in case the person who owns the computer upgrades something and forgets to re-compile the kernel and it causes an issue. It's typically considered, however, a good idea to always keep your old kernel lying around though in case of problems.

What version of GCC did you use and what CFLAGS are you using to specify what cpu/arch cause I read that in anything before 3.4 -march/-mcpu=k8 fails...which I find a bit confusing since that would be the only way I can think of to specify such a thing...

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## camouflageX

 *secondshadow wrote:*   

> Next: I read that devfs is supposed to be causing problems with athlon64's in the 2.4 kernels. Does this extend to the 2.6 kernel? If so, or even if not, should I do some reading on udev instead?

 

I don't have any problems with devs...

 *secondshadow wrote:*   

> I'm really looking forward to watching a kernel compile in like 10 minutes or less. I think the 2.6 in my current (rather lazyily bloated) configuration from the last time I built it too like 20 minutes 

 

Yes, it must be really bloated. My Linux compiles in less than 4 minutes.  :Smile: 

You may want to visit http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-notes.html . There you will find much useful information about Linux on AMD64  :Smile: 

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## secondshadow

The kernel right now resembles something of a slightly stripped LiveCD kernel. I'm only running on an AthlonXP 1600+ and come to think of it I think it actually only takes like 10 minutes or so for a 2.4 kernel. The 2.6's seem to take a little longer. Either way, I wouldn't mind 4 minutes at all. Would make testing kernels much more bearable. Though I do remember how excited I was when I upgraded from my old K6-2 450 to my old SlotA Athlon 800 (top of the line then too). I was sooooo happy that it didn't take a whole hour to compile:)

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## crazycat

I dont use any march setting at all. U dont need it, cause the livecd is already amd64 and gcc also. Anyway, u wouldn't try to install x86 gentoo version from ppc livecd , would u?  :Very Happy:  I use only cflags there for optimisation (can't say witch cause i'm not in gentoo right now). I also use 3.3.2  gcc and it works fine for me.

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## secondshadow

Well...Thanks for all the help guys. I'll probably start post in the "alternate arch" forum a lot now. That and I'll be stopping by the amd64 IRC room a little later tonight. My baby's going under the knife now so hopefully I'll be posting the results of this mis-adventure in about an hour. TTFN.

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## secondshadow

Well this is somewhat painfull...I'm guessing I'm gonna have to build a 2.6 kernel before gentoo's gonna recognize my hardware....wish I'd considered that beforehand. Oh well....hopefully it won't take too long. Gotta wait for windows to finish trying to fix itself. I always love switching motherboards in windows...it never can quite figure out what to do with itself. I'm just gonna see if it can "repair" itself and if not then I'll just re-install, which will be a shame because I broke one of my Visual Studio CD's by accident (academic) and so now I won't be able to re-install it without re-purchasing it again....oh well. Better get off this computer before I get kicked off  :Smile:  Hopefully windows will be able to fix itself 'cause I gotta download the 2.6 sources since 2.4 doesn't seem to be able to figure out whats up with my network card...stupid gigabit ethernet  :Wink:  Will say that even with all the startup errors gentoo started superfast. That was awesome.

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