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First of all I want to mention that my system had a power supply crash. So my hardware may be damaged and some hard- and software problems may only apply to my system.
Pros of this board:
- Covered with features (see Connection Type)
- Good powersaving features and works with Mobile (self modified) Athlons
- Great powersaving and overclockings features (Core Cell chip and software programmable)
Cons of this board:
- VERY problematic board (Hardware conflicts, driver problems)
- Onboard audio card seems to be automatically disabled when a PCI soundcard (and maybe USB?) is plugged in
I think principally this is a very good board: fast chipset and covered with features, BUT you will have to spend a lot of time to get this board perfectly running (and wait until *good* drivers are available)!
1) HARDWARE PROBLEMS:
You will have to choose "good"(=expensive) hardware to get this board running stable.
I have:
- 1 512MB Kingston ValueRam PC3200 module
- 1 TV-Card from Askey (CPH05)
- 1 nVidia Geforce4 MX440 from Pine
- 1 Athlon XP1800+ (self modified to mobile version as described at Tom's Hardware)
- 1 350W Enermax
(- 1 Soundblaster Live! Player 5.1)
And this seems to be suboptimal. FSB at 400MHz crashes VERY often. FSB at 333MHz crashes sometimes. Maybe better RAM is needed (Samsung is very good at the moment).
The Soundblaster card is bracketed because when I plug in the soundcard I cannot use the onboard soundcard. This is very bad because I want to use the SPDIF output. So I removed it.
A drawback of this board is that you have to play a lot with the PCI-Cards. Some cards are only detected and working when they are in a certain slot. The order of the cards is also essential.
2) DRIVER PROBLEMS:
Because of the driver problems you should wait for distributions with kernel version 2.6.9 or higher. Kernel version 2.6.7 and lower don't have included the AGP- (which makes the graphical system incredible slow) and ALSA-drivers you need. I'm running 2.6.8.1+2.6.9-rc2.patch+lirc.patch which seems to be not very stable (system often stalls on heavy traffic on the IDE bus and when try to record movies with my TV-card). Additionally I have detected weird file system corruptions (reiserfs) where files are present with length 0 and can't be accessed/overwritten or deleted. You were warned.
Another problem I still have is the not detected parallel port by the driver "lp". "parport-pc" detects the parallel port, but "lp" not. I don't know why... So printing under Linux is still not possible for me :-(((
What you will have to do after you have installed your Linux system is to compile a kernel yourself. You will have to do this because you MUST disable the following option:
< > generic/default IDE chipset support
In all distributions the standard kernels have this option (for logical reasons) enabled. REASON: This option enabled disables the VIA driver to use DMA. I've read on internet that the VIA-driver contains a hack which needs the above option disabled. Otherwise the very slow PIO-mode is used. You will see error/warning messages with dmesg.
There are still some devices not supported under Linux/kernel. See lspci-output:
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 0269
0000:00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 1269
0000:00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 2269
0000:00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3269
0000:00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 4269
0000:00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 7269
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
0000:00:06.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 78)
0000:00:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 02)
0000:00:08.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 02)
0000:00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3119 (rev 11)
0000:00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
0000:00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
0000:00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
0000:00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [K8T800 South]
0000:00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440] (rev a3)
As you can see the board is a real hog and you have to spend a lot of time to get it well working.
Conclusion:
Overall the system seems to be a bit slower than the one I had before (MSI K7N2) and in some situations sluggish (also under Windows XP). Some driver problems are still not solved and the system is not as stable as I expect. So I can not recommend this board.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid? (in USD): $60.00 | Rating: 9
Kernel (uname -r):
2.6.9-1.678_FC3
Distribution:
Fedora Core 3
It worked flawlessly with Fedora Core 3, no supplemental drivers needed, everything auto-detected. But for most other distros there is going to be some tweaking/driver-locating involved since it is so new.
Also, lm_sensors picked up the MB and CPU diodes, voltages, and fans right away.
None of the default kernels with Slack 10 could identify the SATA controller, I had to pop in a module for FedoraI found on the web.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid? (in USD): $80.00 | Rating: 6
Kernel (uname -r):
2.6.10-1.741_FC3
Distribution:
I currently have the Asus KT880 , i just picked this board up, and i really should have stayed with the KT800. The reason being is that also i get errors while under heavy load from the network such as running movie with XINE or MPLAYER from a network share. After further investigation, i can only conclude two things, either i do not have enough juice for my Athlon XP 2600+ Barton , 1.9GHZ 512k cache, Crucial 512MB PC3200. i have a 350watt power supply, and yes i have tried running at Higher Core Voltage to no avail.
What happens is when i load a movie off of my server, which i have connected via 1000 Mbit Dlink cards / Switch, and i have tried the onboard 1000mbit, it looses internet connectivity, loosing my gateway.
In my hwconf , i have numerous entries for unknown device / uknown driver .
Anyways, KT880 doesnt seem to have proper driver database for current kernels.. Id recommend not getting this for anyone considering using this board under linux.
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