Good 64 bit motherboard

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 06:55:09PM -0400, Marc Lijour wrote:
> I have seen a nice offer in pc village:
> AMD 64Bit Athlon 3000+ CPU, Asus K8V Motherboard, PQI 1Gb Dual Channel
> DDR, 80Gb 7200RPM HDD, 1.44 Floppy, 16x/52x24x52x CDRW Combo, Radeon
> 9200SE 128Mb Video Card, 10/100 Network Card, 32Bit Sound Card, ATX
> Mid-Tower, 600w Speakers w/Subwoofer, Logitech Keyboard, Optical Mouse,
> 17" Samsung LCD
> 
> Everything for 1329$.

Well a few things I would want spec'ed out:

Is the ram DDR 400MHz, since that is what speed the cpu prefers ram at.
Some people put in cheaper 333MHz ram which doesn't run synchronous with
the CPU.

Is the HD SATA or old style IDE?  Why buy old technology?

There is no such thing as a 32 bit sound card.  If you want it to work
well in Linux, get an SB Live! or Audigy (not the LX or LZ or whatever
the cheap not emu10kX based is).

Have you considered just getting a DVD-writer?  They cost very little
extra over the combo drive.

Is it a socket 940, 939 or 7xx?  The 939 is the future for the Athlon
64s, with the 7xx likely to be phased out, and the 940 being for
servers.

> After I did some research on the internet, I found that many people are
> not happy with the board and with ASUS' attitude with respect to Linux
> users.

I have never had any issues with a motherboard and using Linux.  It's a
matter of the chipset and what its support is like for Linux.  If the
chipset maker supports Linux, the motherboard will too pretty much.

As for Asus, they are the only brand I have bought in over 10 years, and
I doubt I will switch brands anytime soon.  They have been reliable for
me, although I also never buy the low end models with the junk chipsets
on them.  If the chipset is bad, the board will be too, no matter how
well it is made.  In general, VIA, Intel and nVidia chipsets have worked
well for me.  I haven't been too impressed by SiS lately, although they
used to make very nice chipsets for 486s.  Opti has never made any good
chipsets, although I also don't think they have tried for years.

Asus ships with 'PnP OS Installed' set to no by default, which is more
Linux friendly than most boards, which seem to default to what Microsoft
wants.

> Do you have some recommandations to do about good hardware that works fine
> with Linux (and more specifically Mandrake)?

I have no idea about mandrake, since my experience with it was never a
good one.

> I heard that almost all software is working with AMD processor, is that
> correct?

Well all software should work in 32 bit mode.  Not sure of the state of
native 64 bit support is, although I know Debian is almost ready to add
it to unstable as another architecture, which is a good sign.

I will stop rambling now. :)

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml