Re: [PLUG] motherboard recommendations

[Will Dyson <will.dyson@gmail.com>]

On 8/8/05, Toby DiPasquale <toby@cbcg.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 11:21:23PM -0400, Michael Lazin wrote:
> > I sold my aging powermac g4, and I want to build myself a linux box
> > because I want top of the line hardware without the g5 pricetag.  I am
> > looking for any motherboard recommendations I can get.  I want socket
> > 939 because I would like a dual core AMD 64 processor.  I am thinking
> > about running fedora as the sole os.  I would like PCIX and SATA.  I
> > would like as many memory slots as I can get and gigabit ethernet.
> > Firewire is a must.  Any suggestions?  Any advice on building a
> > machine specifically for linux?
> 
> I got an Asus K8N-E for use with an Athlon64 CPU. It has hardward SATA
> RAID controllers, built-in USB 2.0 and Firewire, onboard Gigabit Ethernet
> NIC, some NVIDIA video card (I don't use it). The only thing it doesn't
> have that you mentioned is PCI-X. It was pretty cheap, too... on special
> at newegg.com for something less than $70. In addition, the K8N4-E has all
> of the above, plus one PCI-X slot. Its $104 on newegg.com as of the time
> of this email. HTH.

My Nforce-3 based board has been very good to me so far, and I second
the recomendation for an Nforce-4 based board as a linux workstation.

The K8N4-E appears to be a socket-754 motherboard, which will not
support a dual-core processor. ArsTechnica recommended the following
Epox socket-939 board back in June:

http://www.epox.com/USA/product.asp?id=EP-9NPAplusULTRA

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200506.ars/3

The socket-939 boards will pretty much all have 4 dimm slots. Only
multi-processor opteron boards will have more (each processor
potentially having its own set of slots).

Advice on building a linux-only machine: ignore any
motherboard/chipset manufacturer's claims of hardware SATA RAID. They
are lies. It is all bios (and windows driver) based software RAID.
While a bios interface to the raid configuration is nice, it is less
hassle in the long run to use the native linux setup utilities.

http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html

-- 
Will Dyson
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