Expansion Slots:
1 x AGP Pro/8X (1.5V only)
5 x PCI
IDE Ports:
2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66/33
Serial ATA:
Silicon Image® Sil 3112A Controller with 2 ports
Support RAID 0/1
I do not recommend this motherboard to newbies or for the faint of heart. It's proprietary nforce2 chipset is not user-friendly and requires a lot of homework to learn how to install it. The only successfull way I've seen it installed is by recompiling the kernel.
At first I installed Linux and it ran like a champ. 30 minutes later it froze. No shortcut or keystroke would revive it except the cold boot. Give it another 30 minutes and it would freeze again (sometimes doing nothing but sitting at the command line).
Still trying to properly install the proper drivers.
It might be my newbie status, but stay away from NVidia proprietary chipset if you don't plan on getting dirty.
For the not so faint of heart, the board does work nicely. I've heard that the original bios had some lockup problems, but that seems to have been fixed. I've been running 24/7 for three months without any problems. If you don't mind proprietary drivers (or a good sale is enough to convince you to put up with them), it seems to be a worthwhile board.
The original bios of my board identified itself as A7N8X2.0. I upgraded to bios 1.007 from the asus website last week, but it wasn't necessary or useful.
Here's a breakdown of what works. It was tested with stock kernel 2.6.4 and 2.6.5 on Slackware-9.1.
Sound - Realtek ALC650 chipset - works great with alsa (stock 2.6.4 kernel drivers). I've only tried it in stereo mode, not in surround sound, or whatever silly catch phrase they're using these days.
Lan - Requires either the proprietary driver from nvidia, or the forcedeth kernel module. Nvidia supplies a driver for the 2.4 kernels on their web site. Forcedeth is included in recent 2.6 kernels, and a patch is available for 2.4 kernels. There's also a patch which makes the nvidia proprietary driver work on 2.6 kernels. That's what I'm using at present, but I can't seem to find it online. Hunt around for "nvnet" and "2.6 kernel" and see what you can find. Forcedeth is located at http://www.hailfinger.org/carldani/linux/patches/forcedeth/
USB - Seems to be happy with the stock EHCI and OHCI modules. Only tested at usb-1.0 speeds, because I don't have any usb-2.0 devices.
ATA bridge - works great. Be sure to enable the AMD and nVidia IDE support in the kernel (BLK_DEV_AMD74XX). It will run terribly slow with the default ide drivers.
Video, AGP - works with the stock nvidia-agp kernel module. Turn on agpgart and set nvidia nforce/nforce2 as a module. Both are located in the "character devices" section of the kernel's config options. (If you're planning to run it with an ATI video card, you may have to insure DRI is not turned on.)
Other - some people have complained about random lockups with older versions of this board. I haven't had any trouble.
Will it boot from a USB drive? The bios menu says yes, but I can't seem to make it work using either syslinux or lilo on the mbr of a small flash drive. Could be a problem with my drive - I've only tried one drive and one mb.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 0
Kernel (uname -r):
Distribution:
Continuation to my HCL post...
Believe it or not, I'm happy for you. It pleases me to know that people around the world run Linux successfully, even though I have a few problems here and there.
I just wanted to post some reading material about ASUS:
http://www.mozillaquest.com/Linux04/Asus_Sucks_Story-01.html
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.6.3-7mdk
Distribution:
Mandrake 10.0
After many problems under Mandrake 9.2 (spontanious freeze), I Installed Mandrake 10.0 and have not had any problems since. --well over a month now.
Great linux mb.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 6
Kernel (uname -r):
2.6.7-gentoo-r11
Distribution:
Gentoo
Works for the most part with some tweaks here and there, had terrible problems getting a PCMCIA bridge card / pcmcia-cs working with this board, (memory allocation issues) tried loads of difference address ranges in the end i gave up and brought a different mobo. Nvidia chipset is a bit of a pain to setup and get working efficiently as with other posts i experienced freezes sometimes, not a stable board for a machine you plan to use / leave on 24x7 (not in my opinion anyway).
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