Motherboard recommendation?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2004 at 08:28:01PM -0500, William Park wrote:
> What would be your recommendation for motherboard for Linux machine?
> I'm afraid I've been out of touch with current models.  I don't care
> about Overclocking or Gaming.  What I'm looking for is workhorse that is
> reliable, stable, and works.
> 
> - Are you satisfied with ECS's all-in-one motherboards?  It's $80 and
>   disposable.

I personally would rather spend the money for an Asus and get something
that will be supported by the maker for a long time, and is well
designed and put together.

> - Abit or Asus seems to be likely option.  Which model would you
>   recommend?

Well if you want a P4, get something with an Intel chipset (P4P800,
P4C800, etc), with whatever onboard features you want, such as sound,
networking, firewire, etc.  Dual channel ram is also a good idea if you
want the best performance out of the cpu.

For an Athlon, VIA chipsets are pretty much always great, such as the
KT600 (A7V600 and the like), while I personally do like the nforce2
chipset, the linux support isn't quite perfect according to some
messages I have seen.  The A7N8X-DX's onboard SATA works, the PATA
works, sound works ok, but of course you won't get the dolby encoding
since well that requires support for the DSP which isn't available yet.
The network chip has a reverse engineered driver now that is looking
pretty good, but isn't very old yet (2.4.26 and 2.6.3 seem to have it).
It does do dual channel ram and all that so I like that part at least.
Even has two network ports (one of them is gigabit on the -E version of
the board).  I should know tomorrow how the install goes on this board
(I know it will install and run, on the SATA controller, but as for the
sound and such, that will be the interesting part).

Well I hope that helps more than it confuses.

Lennart Sorensen
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