Greetings:
I'm thinking of getting a Biostar P4M80 MB. Anybody have experience with this board? Is it fully supported and all that. It has onboard video(S3 Unichrome) and sound(Realtek ALC 655 AC97 codec) I think video is open source and AC97 is supported but thought I would ask for advice. Can I use an old video card in a new 8x AGP slot? I have a Matrox milennium G400. I think it is a 2x AGP card.
Thanks,
reddog

reddog,

Make sure the board BIOS can address large hard drives (>30MB). I think this is referred to as 48bit LBA capability. I'm having trouble with an Asus P4S800D-X board that does not seem to function with a 100GB Maxtor drive. Drive is definitely good.

Some of the older video cards work on a different voltage and will be bad news in the newer AGP slots. Check it out carefully.

Biostar makes crap motherboards. Also ASUS makes motherboards that are not supported well in Linux and their motherboards are too thin. I prefer Abit motherboards. I do not recommend buying a motherboard based on on-board junk like NIC, sound, IEEE-1394, SATA, VGA. Other motherboard manufactures I suggest are Epox and Gigabyte.

Linux does not use the BIOS to look up the hard drive geometry. Though the boot loader uses the BIOS to look up the hard drive geometry. If /boot partition is smaller than the limits (32 GB) of the BIOS, Linux can still boot up even on a terabyte hard drive.

Assuming you are buying a new mobo, perhaps you are assembling your own system, and if so then the key things (as I see them) are to make sure that:

1. The CPU you intend to buy matches the mobo's socket
2. The CPU's front side bus (FSB) speed is supported by the mobo
3. The RAM (ie, the RAM speed) you want to use is supported by the mobo
4. The mobo has sufficient expansion slots to accommodate your needs (eg, PCI slots, AGP slots, drive bays, etc)

Everyone has their own opinions as to which mobos are best or worst, but in terms of Linux compatibility, at least as I see it the main issue pretty much comes down to whether or not you intend to use any of the onboard devices (sound, video, LAN) because certain chipsets (eg, nVidia) have better support than others. As a general comment though, most mobos are fine with Linux. You might also be interested in checking out the LQ HCL for more info/ratings from your fellow LQ'ers regarding their experiences with given components.

Lastly, as long as you're dealing with an AGP slot, Yes, you could put a slower card into a mobo that supports faster speeds, but obviously it will run at the slower speed. Ideally, all components should be matched to one another in terms of speed but backward compatibility is generally supported

Thanks for the replies! There's alot of things to check out. Technology changes all the time and it's hard to keep up with it.

Thanks again,
reddog

Not to hijack this thread, but I didn't want to post a new one, because it is so close in topic.

Since pretty much all motherboards are coming with onboard sound, video, and nic. How well do these type of boards function with Linux, I know the SiS video chipset doesn't work well with Linux, and I'll avoid that.

But I haven't bought a motherboard since 2003, and was wondering what other people's experience has been like.

thanks

Well, one obvious comment is that if you don't plan on using the onboard devices, their level of compatibility is pretty much a non-issue. In other words, if I know I'm going to be installing my own soundcard and video card, I don't need the onboard sound/video, and if this is the route you'll be going, you can probably find mobos that don't have onboard video, etc.

Overall, I think Linux is fairly hardware-neutral, and generally most mobos work fine. (Again, check out the HCL) Personally, I lean towards Asus, but as I said before everyone has their own preferences. Strictly my 2 cents, good luck with it

Not all motherboards are including on-board video, sound, and NIC. Usually microATX motherboards comes with all the components, but some of them leave out PCIe (PCI Express) and AGP slots.

ASUS does not make Linux compatible motherboards. They are Windows dependent motherboards.

I suggest ABIT NF-95 (socket 939). It comes with everything that you want including a PCIe slot. From the pictures it looks like it uses a Realtek chip for the NIC which will be very easy to setup in Linux. Also it uses a nVidia graphic controller, so it should work in Linux in both 2D and 3D applications.

I recommend ECC memory and a high quality power supply.

The AM2 processors from AMD just came out, so I suggest waiting until August or September for a wider motherboard selection.