OT: motherboards with ULI chipsets

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:39:05PM -0500, Meng Cheah wrote:
> Anyone with experience using motherboards with ULI chipsets?
> 
> I was looking at an Asus motherboard, Asus K8U-X Socket 754 ULI M1689 
> Chipset DDR400 Serial ATA Raid AGP 8X 10/100 Lan 5.1 Ch Audio.
> $68.99 at Canada Computers.
> 
> Understand the company is a Taiwanese company started in 2002. 
> http://www.uli.com.tw/eng/index_eng.php
> Motherboards that use the M1689 chipset include Asus, Gigabyte, 
> ChainTech, DFI, Abit and Asrock.

I keep wondering if they are related to ALi.  I have used machines with
ALi chipsets (Asus P5A for example) which worked great.  I don't have
any experience with ULi yet.  I know many ATI chipset boards use ULi
south bridges since ATI's 'SATA 2' south bridge isn't ready and ATI's
north bridge uses the same interconnect as ULi (that being I believe
PCIe).  I wouldn't touch the ATI chipsets yet, but that doesn't mean ULi
doesn't work.

Personally I have only used VIA and nVidia with athlon 64s so far, and I
have been very happy with them.  I haven't seen anything from ULi that
makes me want to get one of those instead.  I also personally don't see
the point in the socket 754 particularly, since I think a cpu like the
athlon 64 really needs the memory bandwidth of dual channel memory, and
I don't think a Semptron is my kind of cpu.  For some tasks however,
being cheap is more important and then they probably do make sense.

Of course, forget the "raid" option is there.  It isn't hardware raid
and is only really useful for windows which doesn't do software raid
very well.

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