# Recommend a motherboard (athlon) please

## counterpt

Hi,

This is probably a bad question.

Can someone recommend a motherboard that has ata100 but no scsi or promise chips (or doesn't recquire you to use them). I had a soyo dragon plus (via kt266) that's dying and was curious what others recommend.

The platform is athlon. I had an Asus a7v (via kt133), which was incredibly stable butI ran it with ata33 since I never got the promise controller to work ( I spent months trying).

Since I have the ram and a few athlons, I'd happily take reomndations for pc133 and pc266 memory compatible boards.

At this point I'm inclinded to buy soyos because I don't have to fight with drivers. I'm sure there are better choices? I know some of the abits have goofy controllers too so I try to stay away too

Even better if it doesn't have screaming chipset fan  :Smile: 

Thanks a lot!

----------

## taskara

well ..

I think via has pretty good support for linux, at least their drivers are in the kernel..

I however am currently running an nforce2 mainboard (Asus A7N8X) and it is phenominal.

I guess you need to ask yourself whether you want onboard raid, do you want serial raid ? do you want DUAL DDR technology ? do you want agp 8X ? do u want onboard graphics ? onboard nic ? how much do you want to spend?

the fastest athlon board atm is the nforce2... of which soyo does not have a model..

let me know what you think you want, etc and I'd be glad to help you out..

----------

## counterpt

Thanks.

AGP 4x is good enough (if 8x is backward comptabile then it doesn't matter).

I really don't care if it has onboard graphics/lan/sound. On my old Soyo, Gentoo wouldn't compile if I had either the onboard lan or sound enabled. So if a motherboard has these, I would probably disable them as I did with the soyo and just add pci cards instead.

Basically I'm looking for the easiest way. On my old asus a7v, I couldn't get Gentoo to find anything on the promise controller so I was stuck at ata33. RedHad could find drives on it but I'm beyond redhat now   :Smile:   So I know it's possible but since I have to get a new MB, I'd rather get one that I don't have to fight with...

Just to give you and insight to my backward mentality: I had a Radeon 8500dv and I fought with it for a few days then I bought a cheapo GeForce just because there were instructions for it in the Gentoo documentaion...

I liked the via kt133 and kt233 because everything was in the kernel.

I don't want to use any sort of raid at all. The soyo seemed to have ata100 without needing any drivers at all. I would love to get an Asus or something but I don't want to find out later that I have to use Promise or Highpint or whatever goofy chip they have.

Since I have to get 2 boards, I don't want to spend too much on a pc133 compatible one (looking for used ones on ebay). The other one I can spend more on since I learned something a while ago:

I can either buy a cheap motherboard, get frustrated, and buy an expensive one. Or I can buy and expensive motherboard in the first place and save some money!

Thanks again.

----------

## chh

Hi,

I am using the Dragon plus myself since last year and I am rather enthusiastic about it. Though I must say that LAN and sound work fine here with Gentoo (1.2 and 1.4), only waiting to try to use surround sound.

But now to your actual question. If you are satisfied with your Dragon then stick with its younger brothers, as I here the Dragon Ultra is very stable, fast and has good componentes on board, like the Dragon plus. That's why I chose it, you probably, too.

The only alternative for me would be one of the MSI boards.

After all on a chipset level I would normaly prefer the nforce2 (they seem to be far better than the KT400), with seperate graphics of course. But as Linux support is really weak till now you should stick with a VIA chipset.

Regards

Christian

----------

## taskara

well..

if you don't need super dooper graphics, then I would probably recommend an nforce2 mainboard with onboard VIDEO and sound and LAN.

they often also come with firewire, optical in / out, serial ata (supported by 2.5x kernels) usb 2.0, and a gf2 mx 440 type graphics. it is everything you would need, and more.

the support for it is good - fast ide ata 133 (using generic ide driver) the sound is brilliant using alsa, the nforce network card is detected and fully supported by the gentoo 1.4 cd. firewire and usb2 all work flawlessly, it's DUAL DDR and it's faaaast.

my western digital hdd test shows: *Quote:*   

> /dev/hda:
> 
>  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.32 seconds =400.00 MB/sec
> 
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.39 seconds = 46.04 MB/sec
> ...

 

you don't need to spend any money on anything ! (except hdd or cdrw etc if needed)

I would recommend the following nforce 2 boards:

Asus A7N8X Deluxe (NO onboard video)

Abit nforce 2 (WITH onboard video)

MSI nforce2 (WITH onboard video)

also check out these reviews part 1 and part 2

Or then there's one of my favourites.. the Shuttle SN41G2 nForce2 Barebones System

of course you could always go kt400, but its performance and other onboard components are not as good.

let me know if I can help any further..

----------

## fca

However, if you want easy support (like it being detected in the normal kernel, instead of having to run vanilla-sources or ac-sources) and your network card detected out of the box, and simple sound setup, I wouldn't recommend any nForce 2 board for Linux. 

I have one working, but it learned me a lot about kernel drivers, modules and all that kinds of things. Stay with a Via (and not a KT400) for out of the box detection and that sort of thing.

----------

## counterpt

Wow, thanks a lot for the help.

I'm begining to think something was wrong specifically with the boards I have (Since I had trouble and others didn't with the onboard components on the same board). I think that's why I got so frustrated--maybe my hardware was bad.

Wow, now I don't know! I thought newer kt's (above 266) weren't suppoerted yet either so I'd have to muck with kernel anyway, then it's not that much more work for nforce. I wonder if you lose much if you use the vanilla kernel instead of the gentoo-sources... To be honest I was looking at other kt266s since I didn't thank the ram speed made a huge difference.

I hadn't even considered the nforce, I was just thinking about the via's. I have all the componets anyway so I don't care that much about onboard stuff.

But you guys are really tempting me with the nforce (I run chemistry calculations (fortran) so floating point and fast ram (if it makes that much difference) are just so tempting). I use it for everyday stuff too and a little for games.

Well, thanks a lot for the links and the suggestions, I have to read up and do more reasearch on it. Thanks for the head's up on the kt400.

I can't say it enough, I don't know how to thank you...!

----------

## chh

 *counterpt wrote:*   

> 
> 
> But you guys are really tempting me with the nforce (I run chemistry calculations (fortran) so floating point and fast ram (if it makes that much difference) are just so tempting). I use it for everyday stuff too and a little for games.
> 
> 

 

You are asking a good question there. Will you really feel any speed differences?? Let's say board A is 10% faster than board B, which is quite a huge difference when using the same CPU and same other components (5% or less is nearer the mark).

Now you have some process that takes 100% of your system power and takes 1 hour to complete (would mostly be a compile i guess). Then board B will finish around 6 minutes before board A does. OK

If this process takes an average of 50% this drops to 3 minutes. In "normal" work you won't even see much difference if the one board would be 20% faster.

So I guess you see my point. OK I said before that the Dragon Plus is a fast board but that thing comes third after being stable and being a good bargain and that is true for this board.

Christian

----------

## counterpt

 *chh wrote:*   

> 
> 
> So I guess you see my point. OK I said before that the Dragon Plus is a fast board but that thing comes third after being stable and being a good bargain and that is true for this board.
> 
> Christian

 

You are right. Stabilty comes first. My calculations run from 5 minuts to many weeks. Once I ran a calculation for over six weeks. So 10% is vary tempting. But if it's not stable, it's worthless, and if I can't set it up, it's worthless  :Smile: 

So I'll take stability and usefullness over speed, but it's sooo tempting...

Thanks again.

----------

## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> Stay with a Via (and not a KT400) for out of the box detection and that sort of thing.

 kt400's work just fine with the latest kernel.

The nforce 2 boards are fast but they're also quite expensive and apparently a pain in the ass to get working in Linux. Here's the performance difference though, and note they're using 400Mhz CAS2 DDR memory(expensive), with slower memory the difference between the boards will be less. I suggest buying 333Mhz ddr as the 400Mhz is very expensive and the performance difference is very little.

http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1719&p=9

 *Quote:*   

>  I had an Asus a7v (via kt133), which was incredibly stable butI ran it with ata33 since I never got the promise controller to work

 The A7V has two ide connectors that use the onboard via ide support and 2 for the promise, the 2 via ones would of worked fine without any special effort to get them working and they support up to udma4 which would leave the hard drive as the bottleneck.

http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socketa/a7v/overview.htm

 *Quote:*   

> I really don't care if it has onboard graphics/lan/sound. On my old Soyo, Gentoo wouldn't compile if I had either the onboard lan or sound enabled. So if a motherboard has these, I would probably disable them as I did with the soyo and just add pci cards instead. 

 If I'm understanding this correctly, you were using a Soyo Dragon Plus? This is a kt266A board with CMI 8738 audio and ICS lan PHY, all supported by Linux. Was probably a little bit of bad luck that caused this combination to not automatically work.

Considering you don't have any special requirements, you just want a board that's easy to setup and is fast it doesn't matter too much what you go for. Cheapest kt333 board you can find made by a major manufacturer will do just fine.

 *Quote:*   

> I had a soyo dragon plus (via kt266) that's dying and was curious what others recommend.

 You're sure motherboard is dying? That's a fairly new board to be dying already. Any bulging capacitors on the board? If so you can always replace them.

----------

## taskara

 *fca wrote:*   

> However, if you want easy support (like it being detected in the normal kernel, instead of having to run vanilla-sources or ac-sources) and your network card detected out of the box, and simple sound setup, I wouldn't recommend any nForce 2 board for Linux. 
> 
> I have one working, but it learned me a lot about kernel drivers, modules and all that kinds of things. Stay with a Via (and not a KT400) for out of the box detection and that sort of thing.

 

I have not had any trouble with my nforce2 board.

I installed gentoo using 1.4_rc2-14th jan cd, and my nic works perfectly.

video is supported by nvidia drivers.

sound is easier to get working than sblive! with alsa, it's just intel8x0 module.

usb and firewire all worked without any configuration other than selecting the right type in the kernel.

and I'm currently using gentoosources 2.4.19

what hassles did you have ? I had none  :Smile: 

----------

## taskara

oh btw, I forgot to mention I also have a asus A7V333 and A7V8X (kt333 and kt400) as well as my nforce board.

don't forget gentoo 1.4_rc3 is sheduled for release thursday (US time) and it will have nforce nic support built into the boot cd.

anyway it's all up to you, perhaps if you already have video card and sound and nic, you might not want to get an nforce with it all onboard. then again the kt400 chipsets also come with onboard nic (the asus is broadcom - which is harder to get working than the nforce!  :Razz: ) and also onboard sound (realtek ALC650) which is not too bad, but not as good as the nforce.

Considering an nforce2 mainboard comes with an onboard gf4 mx, and dolby digital sound and (sometimes) dual network cards.. the slightly higher cost is probably reduced to a saving.

Also for your information, I have an AMD 2400+ cpu, running at default speeds (133 fsb) with 2x 512mb corsair pc3500 DDR sdram (220fsb) running in dual ddr mode. this is overkill because I won't run my cpu at 200 mhz fsb, but u should get pc 2700 ddr cas2 ram.

----------

## dsegel

I'm using an ASUS A7N266, which is a low-end built-in-everything mobo. The 1.4rc2 LiveCD already had the nvnet drivers for the NIC, the sound is standard Intel (as mentioned) and the gentoo nvidia drivers work fine for X.

I had to download and install the nvnet driver after install 'cause they weren't installed from the CD, but other than that I've had no real issues to speak of.

Oh yeah - GRUB doesn't work 'cause the onboard video uses shared RAM and something's not happy. Not a problem for me because I like lilo better anyway.

----------

## taskara

fyi, ASUS A7N266 is the original nforce (nforce 1).. which can still be bought and uses DDR sdram and has gf2mx video onboard, 100Mbit nic and various chipsets for sound.

one this to remember, if you buy ANY nforce product, u need TWO memory modules, so that you can take advantage of DUAL DDR

----------

## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> one this to remember, if you buy ANY nforce product, u need TWO memory modules, so that you can take advantage of DUAL DDR

 

This doesn't include nforce 1 220 boards (and I don't think you can still buy any 420 ones). The difference with dual DDR is relatively small although I do agree it's worth taking advantage of.

I'm installing 1.4rc2 on an ASUS A7N266 right now. I used pc2700 memory and set the ram to "266mhz cas 2 turbo", memtester is reporting the memory speed to be 690M/sec which is very fast. The nic in this one is using nvnet, although older ones use a realtek apparently. The board is well designed with high quality Nichicon capacitors and a heatsink on the nforce chip instead of a noisy fan. These are cheap motherboards, highly recommended for those wanting a cheap mobo with onboard video.

Edit: A few notes on installing gentoo with this board. Don't forget to "emerge nforce-net" before rebooting from the live CD and if you want to use grub you'll have to install .93 which is currently masked, lilo works fine though (grub .92 won't work).Last edited by Malakin on Thu Feb 27, 2003 9:17 pm; edited 2 times in total

----------

## taskara

I think the nforce 1 also used "dual ddr" technology, tho it wasn't called that. I think it was 128bit memory instead of 64 or something.. but having 2 memory sticks does make a hell of a difference on my msi nforce 1 mainboard.

how did you emerge memtester? I'd like to check my speed.. and post the results if I get it to work  :Smile: 

----------

## EvilReagan

Right now I'm running Gentoo on a Gigabyte GA-7VRXP. No problems with the onboard LAN, sound, or USB. I haven't tried the Promise driver, you can turn it off in BIOS. Uses up to PC2700. I haven't had a single crash yet in Gentoo (only a couple months), and only 10 or so in WinXP (over a year... bleh). When I say crash, I mean even an app crashing. This board is a rock.  :Cool: 

----------

## counterpt

This is a great amount of info. Thanks a lot. And I have some choices. I wonder if there's a list of easy to set up hardware for everything, not just compatible ones  :Smile: 

I'm good to go though, thanks again.

Just to answer your question:

 *Malakin wrote:*   

>  *Quote:*   I had a soyo dragon plus (via kt266) that's dying and was curious what others recommend. You're sure motherboard is dying? That's a fairly new board to be dying already. Any bulging capacitors on the board? If so you can always replace them.

 

I managed to fry one of the memory ports. And now if I plug a chasis fan to any of the motherboard 3-pins, it becomes highly unstable. And eveytime something goes wrong compiling or something, the motherboard is in the back of my mind as a possible cause.

----------

## dweigert

Just remember to get a GOOD power supply.  A no-name, or under sized one can kill system stability as well.

----------

## Malakin

 *Quote:*   

> Just remember to get a GOOD power supply. A no-name, or under sized one can kill system stability as well.

 This really isn't all that common. Power supply problems usually happen when someone upgrades a system and they continue to use the original power supply without even considering their new power usage requirements. Power supplies sold today are generally 300W+ and this is fine for just about anyone.

If you're running dual cpus, or you have 4 drives or something that uses a lot of power then a beefier power supply is definitely required though.

----------

## fca

 *taskara wrote:*   

>  *fca wrote:*   However, if you want easy support (like it being detected in the normal kernel, instead of having to run vanilla-sources or ac-sources) and your network card detected out of the box, and simple sound setup, I wouldn't recommend any nForce 2 board for Linux. 
> 
> I have one working, but it learned me a lot about kernel drivers, modules and all that kinds of things. Stay with a Via (and not a KT400) for out of the box detection and that sort of thing. 
> 
> I have not had any trouble with my nforce2 board.
> ...

 

Well, installing was no hassle, but to get everything working properly was a major pain.

I had to install another nic to get network. It failed to detect the nvidia nic on my A7N8X.

I have no integrated video, but a Radeon 9500 Pro, which proved to be another hassle, but that's off-topic. The major problem was that DMA was not functioning. That was absolutely terrible as everything slowed down to a crawl. 2.4.21-pre4-ac4 supports it now though.

As for the sound, the A7N8X non-deluxe has another soundsystem, which I never even bothered to touch, as I had an Audigy. As I moved here from Mandrake, and had little experience in even such simple things as modprobe, it took me a while to figure out, but it was quite a instructive experience.

It's perfectly stable though. I've done a complete install, with KDE and OpenOffice, and though I shut down my computer in the night to get some sleep, I have never seen it crash on me in the past 2 months (including Windows 2000) *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> usb and firewire all worked without any configuration other than selecting the right type in the kernel.
> 
> and I'm currently using gentoosources 2.4.19
> ...

 

Is DMA with you working? I found that is completely useless for a desktop machine without DMA, and DMA works for me only in 2.4.21-pre4-ac4 and higher (and somewhat in 2.4.20)

USB worked fine though.

----------

## aardvark

 *counterpt wrote:*   

> 
> 
> The platform is athlon. I had an Asus a7v (via kt133), which was incredibly stable butI ran it with ata33 since I never got the promise controller to work ( I spent months trying).
> 
> 

 

My A7V surely has ATA 66 on the standard ports!

For the rest: I just picked up a ECS k7s5a pro for 52 EURO and until now ( 4 days of compiling and doing allsorts) it is soung just fine. VERY stable and I will only have to reboot to find out wether the onboard LAN is supported... (disabled in bios, but I got the right modules I think)

Onboard Sound is working 

ACPI seems to be working

I'm running it with sdram (I t supports DDR too)

The PRO version also has USB 2.0! the no pro version is known to have problems in some cases but I suspect they got their act together with this pro version! Recommended an Cheap! (Oh yes, you still need a good stable PSU)

----------

## sl70

I've been drooling over the EPoX EP-8RGA+ (with the nforce2 IGP) for months, now, but it hasn't come out yet. They are telling me now it will be about 2 weeks. But just today I read on the linux-xfs list that there are problems using the xfs filesystem with the nforce2. Does anyone have any experience with this?  :Question: 

----------

## jing

 *aardvark wrote:*   

> 
> 
> For the rest: I just picked up a ECS k7s5a pro for 52 EURO and until now ( 4 days of compiling and doing allsorts) it is soung just fine. VERY stable and I will only have to reboot to find out wether the onboard LAN is supported... (disabled in bios, but I got the right modules I think)
> 
> 

 

I am thinking about picking up one of those as a cheap upgrade for my girlfriend's aging P133.  Have you got the onboard LAN working?  And if so, what's the right kernel module for it?  Which module should I use for the onboard sound?  Thanks in advance.

----------

## fishhead

I have a Tyan Tiger MP board and I must say that I'm very happy with it. The Tyan Thunder is also good. I ultimatly turned AGP off because the NVidia drivers weren't being nice, but other than that, it's been very stable. I've had a chipset overheating problem when I'm in my hot (90+ F in the summer)  dorm room, with my very crappy case that gets HORRIBLE air flow, and overtaxed power supply ... but my circumstances are a bit extreme and were fixed by ataching a small house fan to the case and having it blow directly on the chipset. When my dorm room was not so hot, I ran it for (usualy) 20 - 30 day blocks, turning it off only to change bios settings or do stuff with the hardware. I've had it stay up 92 days ... this would have been longer had I not wanted to switch from Red Hat to Gentoo. 

If you have an Athlon XP then you could actualy use the second processor as well (XP = MP - "Official AMD support"). 

I would also stay away from (among others) K7A and K7A-RAID boards. Apperantly they used an experimental process in the capacitors on the board that has resulted in boards dieing after about two years. I've seen this happen to not one but TWO diffrent K7A boards within a few months of each other. They work fine one day .... then ... POOF! Dead.

----------

## aardvark

jing: 

The k7s5a-pro board I had is now gone into the new computer of my sister, where it runs without the need for a lan card. 

-Lan: I am not sure if I remember correctly wether I got the network card working or not, but there is a module in the kernel config that is somehow related to (and has in the name) Sis. Anyway, the chip seems to be of the the type "RealTek RTL8201BL 10/100Mbps PHYceiver" So maybe look for a realtek module (or boot knoppix and see what module it loads for the network card: lsmod)

-Sound: I believe it was the same module as the one I use for my own k7s5a (non-pro): under sound-> Intel ICH, which is also for sis7012. Perhaps knoppix can also give an answer here.

Good luckLast edited by aardvark on Thu Jul 24, 2003 1:08 pm; edited 1 time in total

----------

## pmjdebruijn

lo,

I've got a ASRock A7VM2 myself, works great with Linux, it's features...

USB2, ATA133, DDR 266mhz, Via Rhine LAN, Via AC97 Sound, Via Chipset, Via ProSavage graphics.

The A7VT2 is the same but without the onboard graphics. It's a pretty cheap board... But it's rock solid. And performs nice too.

Bye,

Dr. Z

----------

## sputnik1969

 *jing wrote:*   

> I am thinking about picking up one of those as a cheap upgrade for my girlfriend's aging P133.  Have you got the onboard LAN working?  And if so, what's the right kernel module for it?  Which module should I use for the onboard sound?  Thanks in advance.

 

I'm using a K7S5A for about one year, and it works really fine. Onboard NIC is SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter and the soundchip works fine with ALSA, module is snd-intel8x0. It's one of the cheapest Athlon-Boards on market, you should be able to get one for around 35 or less...

----------

## jing

 *sputnik1969 wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I'm using a K7S5A for about one year, and it works really fine. Onboard NIC is SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter and the soundchip works fine with ALSA, module is snd-intel8x0. It's one of the cheapest Athlon-Boards on market, you should be able to get one for around 35 or less...

 

Vielen Danke.  I just got the pro version, and the onboard NIC and sound chip were correctly identified by the Gentoo installation program.  The NIC works fine, but I am having some problems with the sound module included in the 2.4.20 kernel.  I guess I'll try ALSA next, maybe even the 2.6.0 beta kernel with ALSA already merged.

----------

