Asus A8N-E - to buy or not to buy?
 

Hi all,

I am going to buy this computer:
http://www.targa.co.uk/index.jsp?SID...AREA=undefined

A Targa Ultra AN64II 3700+.

It looks all good to be honest.

The graphics card I will wrestle with later (I assume I'll get it working, even if it may be difficult - as long as it's possible.)

I was just wondering about the Asus A8N-E motherboard, it looks like good compatibility and I googled for any Linux info. I got some incomplete problems about SATA drives, but I am only going to have one Primary Master SATA HDD.

As for the nForce4 Ultra - I think it is compatible right??

So just please tell me if there is any Linux (specifically Slackware 10.2 and 11.0) problems or incompatibility with this computer - mainly the motherboard.

Oh and I am buying it on Monday, so please respond quickly :).

Thanks

Kourosh

Looks pretty nice, But I have heard bad things about the SATA support on those boards. You planning on making a media center out of that box? If so, the Hauppauge tuner card will work fine. BTW, I am from the US, how much is 999 Euros in American Dollars? Cheers.

<<Samoth>>

Noisy fan
 

I'm not 100% sure it is the one I am thinking about, but a friend of mine has a similar board (if not the same, I'm not sure of the modell) and the fan on it is VERY noisy. Actually was, it got replaced by a passive cooler which made the computer silent. What a difference! He also had problems with SATA (most corrected through BIOS update and fiddling around in BIOS), IDE seems to work just fine (has HD since one week only).

Hey I was thinking the Media Centre wasn't going to work! If it works on Linux thats cool.

The SATA could be a problem yes...

But the problems I've seen are to do with Mandriva/Mandrake and two SATA HDD's.

And I'm using Slackware and one SATA HDD.

And I've seen others using this motherboard fine.

I suppose I could buy an IDE HDD and use that instead if things are that bad.

If the fan is noisy, I'll just see if I can return it, or replace it.

I read something about sata_nv kernel module? Any ideas?

By the way I'm getting this computer for £499.99 which is $951.330973(USD)
€999 is $1,278.6201 (USD).

Thanks, I'll probably buy it anyway, the problems are vaguely minimal and easy to fix.

Oh, and is their anyway of internally adding SATA support to an old motherboard?
Kourosh

It was an early model -
 

So it might be they have improved the fan. You also should have newer BIOS on it, so fewer problems.

"Oh, and is their anyway of internally adding SATA support to an old motherboard?
Kourosh"

Yes, but you need an additional PCI controller for it.

And expect some noise from the fan. But you can put some Zalman cooler on it, if it is too loud, like this one (don't know dealer, but you can find it a little bit everywhere).
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...ges&doy=search

Vampirite

The problem with sata is usually not using it but booting to it. Usually you can temporarily add a pata drive, do the install, install the sata boot drivers, then transfer everything over to the sata drive. Personally I find it easier to just boot to pata and use my sata drives for storage. I have an Asus a8n5x and the only problem I have had is slow transfers from pata to sata (or sata to pata)(nobody seems to have a clue as to why). The pata drive runs 57MB/sec and the sata 73MB/sec(the pata drive is older). Transfering accross GigE is fast to either drive.

The noise from the fan can also be dealt with buy installing the heat pipe from the next motherboard up ( the sli premium one, it escapes me at the moment). The steel one will fit but the copper one(from two motherboards up) will not. Last I heard the heat pipe was $15 without shipping from the asus store.


Good luck

Lazlow

I have the same motherboard , I just bought it last week -a new one- from one PC shop 66€. it is great and works very good with my AMD athlon 64.
between, for Sata , they give me an extra paper with the books of the motherboard. in the paper they said :
thechnical updates
OLD SATA===========>REVISED
SATA4===============>SATA2
SATA3===============>SATA1
SATA2===============>SATA4
SATA1===============>SATA3

With any motherboard that contains fan to cool off the chipset is pathetic and dumb. I recommend passive cooling for chipsets because there is no way that the chipset will halt the bus when it overheats. When chipsets overheat, they will still function, but they will corrupt your data.

I recommend wired mouse and keyboard instead wireless mouse and keyboard. A wired mouse and keyboard provides more reliability. Wireless inputs are in the 2.4 GHz range which means it have to share with wireless NIC, cordless phones, cellphones, A/V transmitters, etc.

Using SATA Seagate hard drives are a waste. On terms of file server performance, it is very, very slow. I recommend using PATA hard drives instead and the brands that I recommend are Hitachi and Western Digital. On-board SATA plays around with DMA and PIO modes. Also it corrupts data, so that is why I strongly recommend using PATA hard drives. If you want to go with SATA, use Highpoint RocketRAID 1520, Highpoint RocketRAID 1540, Highpoint RocketRAID 1620, or any 3ware model. Promise SATA controllers have the same problems as on-board SATA controllers, so do not consider buying them.

A desktop/workstation using wireless NIC is pathetic. Only mobile computers should use wireless NIC.

I used to use a pata drive to load my kernel off of(couldn't figure out in my BIOS how to boot sata) then mount my root partition on the sata drive. Worked pretty well but if you wanted to compile a kernel, it wasn't so easy(wish I had know about chroot back then).

Woah this seriously has me worrying now...!!

Wireless I knew about, I wasn't going to use them anyways.

However...

You have got me thinking that I could have my data being corrupted easily. Thats not good, I sort of like stability.

And about the cooling, data corruption and motherboard blowing up won't happen right??

I've never used SATA, PATA and the likes. Only basic IDE ATA ones. Will I simply be able to use ATA??

So...

Can I boot SATA?
Will my data be easily corrupted?
Is cooling a problem, or can I keep it the way it is?
Does everything work the same (grub etc.) in SATA as ATA?
Can I use an ATA drive?

The point is I've got someone to buy it today, that means I could have it now.

And it also means I'm low on money.

This isn't good.

Oh and by the way Samoth, you are older than me ;)

This motherboard doesn't have good old ATA does it?

Damn...

Pata and ide are the same thing (essentially)

Yes, you can boot sata. Your just have to jump through a few hoop to get there.

Very few people have data corruption problems (same as in windows).

They had some very bad fans with the first run of motherboards. The fans do make some noise. The option is always there to replace the chipset fan if it becomes a problems (less than $20). Lots of people run this motherboard without issue.

PATA= plain old ide (essentially).

Sata requires drivers (just like pata) but they are not include in the base boot package. So one needs to get the sata drivers from the install disk (cd/dvd) onto the sata HD before you can boot to the sata HD. This is the tricky part(or PITA part). Once the drivers are in place you can treat it just like an ide device. This little shuffle is why so many people boot to pata (ide) and run off sata.

Good luck

Lazlow

Aha, well I've got the computer now, I'll see when I get it up and running.

So I can just plug my ATA drive into the PATA slot?

Anywho, I'll see what I can do, and I'll be back here...

Yep, plug pata into ata and away you go.

No, motherboards do not explode. They just fry or cook. In order to explode, you need pressure. The only component on the motherboard that will explode is capacitors. Usually the capacitors in the power supply will go first because they are under voltage and temperature stress.

Like I said earlier active heatsinks (heatsinks with an aid of fans) for chipsets is bad. Fans are noisy, unreliable, and produces a hotspot. It does not matter how well it is designed. It is still bad. I recommend motherboard models with heatpipe or passive cooling. Heatpipe uses a pipe that is fill with special liquid that reacts to heat. Heatpipes transfers the heat to another location to release the heat mostly around the CPU or outside of the computer case. Replacing chipset cooling with a better one is hard because most of the motherboards place the chipset near PCI Express or PCI slots. Water cooling could be done, but it costs a lot of money to get it started.

Linux SATA support for Intel, VIA, SIS, ATI, nVidia, ALI, Silicon Image, and Promise controllers are poor. I recommend not using these controllers for SATA hard drives. The listed Highpoint controllers are reliable and stable under 24/7 use. Anyways, there is always a possibility of corruption when using DMA. 3ware SATA controllers are also good for 24/7 operation.

I do not like ASUS boards because they are flismly or not thick to handle the vibrations and over-sized CPU heatsinks. I prefer ABIT boards because they are thick and they have cheaper models that have heatpipe cooling for the chipsets. I sometimes suggest Gigabyte boards too.

Okaay...

How do I install Linux on SATA though, for example Slackware.

Does Slackware include the drivers for my SATA motherboard? And if it needs drivers, how do you get the install CD to recognise your HDD?

Do you, by any chance, work for Highpoint or 3ware? :) I have had no issues with onboard NVidia SATA controller (nForce4). I think it's very much like Lazlow said - very few people had data corruption issues, and those issues have now been fixed. The Linux SATA development team consider sata_nv to be production ready. I would have no qualms using SATA on a production box.

So am I just booting Slackware's sata.i?

And it works?

When I installed Gentoo, I chose a kernel that had SATA support and yes - "it just worked". Completely unlike Windows XP :)

This is sort of weird.

A minute ago, I was told that it is difficult to get Linux and SATA working, now I'm told it is easy.

Does Slackware's sata.i automatically support my motherboard's SATA (nForce4 Ultra?).

Meaning sata.i already contains sata_nv which is stable and good to use?

Or do I need to install nVidia's sata_nv nForce drivers?

????

Here's the link to the official web page for Linux ATA. It describes the features found in 2.6.17-git2 (which is probably more recent than is available in the installers, but the nvidia drivers haven't changed that much in a while). There's a maturity table at the bottom.

http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html

You won't need to install nvidia's sata drivers, since the required sata drivers will be in the kernel. All you'll need to do is ensure that the kernel that you use day to day has the drivers either compiled in, or compiled as a module.

As I said before - I've never had any problems running SATA on my nForce4 board, and I've got 4 SATA drives plugged into it. I don't appear to have had any data corruption issues - and let me tell you I would notice!

Good luck

Vampirite

It is more than possible that the installation issues I spoke of have now been cleared up (not sure either way). It may very well be that it is now as easy as gzunk says.

Lazlow

git kernels are experimental, so be careful. Only use them when you have to.

If you use the latest stable kernel, you should be ok with SATA, but backup more often than usual. For SCSI or sdX devices, make sure you specify a label when formating partitions. Using labels makes it easier to boot up Linux more predictably. If software for controllers are setup as modules, include them in initrd to load them up at boot up. Use mkinitrd to help you make an initrd file.

No I do not work for Highpoint and 3ware. I do have Highpoint 370 and Highpoint 370/372 based controllers which the RocketRAID 1520 uses. I only read about 3ware and there are no problems yet. I am not fan of any controller, but when I see and read that a controller is stable and reliable under use, I use it. Promise controllers does too much black magic behind the scenes, so I would never consider them.

Good stuff.

I need to test the computer first, if it is working and stable, then I'll install Linux.

Also since I only want to install Slackware 11.0, I have to wait for that to be released. ;)

I have a VIA integrated sata controller and it works great. The reason I first had to use a pata drive is because I couldn't figure out how to boot a sata drive from the BIOS(stupid me).

@Vampirite--It doesn't matter how old you are, just how much you know.;-)

Right
I have that particular board and I have yet to find a feature that I need and doesn't work.
I have single sata-hdd pata-dvd-burner and dual core.
I don't find the chipset fan loud at all. It adjusts it's speed according to the chipset temp and mine is running so silently it's not audible 1 meter away. Also, the temp sensors are working which on some forums seem to have been an issue. Running Kubuntu 6.06.

Okay, got it running.

But I haven't downloaded Slackware 11.0 yet so it's still running Windows.

I have no complaints about it, it is a great computer. Fast, powerful, with plenty of features.

However...

The hard disk is loud. Very loud. It is a Seagate and I've never used them before. I've always had Maxtor and they are quiet and fast.

But this Seagate one is loud. When you move data or use the hard disk in an intensive way (such as partitioning), It is loud, and it you can hear a sort of buzzing noise as it writes to the disk.

Now, is it a faulty/dying hard disk? Or do all Seagates happen to be like this? I don't want to be losing data!

I have Seagate drives but they are used for storing backups. No they should not be loud, but they get very, very hot. I do not recommend Seagate and Maxtor as a desktop hard drive because they are horrible for file servers or as an OS drive. I recommend hard drives from either Hitachi or Western Digital. I have Western Digital RE 160 GB that is quiet and it should last me years.

Vampirite

If you are talking about the .10 seagates the ones made in in China (I think) tend to be much louder. Mine is very quiet. The newer seagates in general run about 10 degrees warmer than WD. The temperature is not an indication of a fault with the drive this is just how they run. Seagate used to have a utility that you could run to put the drives in a quieter mode. I have no idea if they still have that utility or if it would work on your drive. Just for curiosity where did you get the drive?

Lazlow

The drive came with the computer.

And I've downloaded SeaTools. Gonna test that out soon.

I'm yet to find out what model it actually is. I need to check that too.

Can't do it now, I'm downloading Slackware 11.0 Disc 2!

SeaTools checked out my HDD okay, I'll have to live with the noise. Although it is quieter on Linux than Windows XP...

I downloaded Slackware 11.0, it was dodgy on kernel 2.4, with slow mouse, and a few hardware (agpgart) problems. Solved with a 2.6 kernel!

However, I am mounting NTFS partitions read-only, which is what I want, but no users except root can read it, I want everyone to be able to read it and no-one to write to it.

And then the hardest thing of all, how do I install ATI graphics drivers? Just the installer from the site?

For the NTFS, edit /etc/fstab and add ro,umask=0222 to the options of the line reffering to your NTFS partition.

For the ATI drivers, just use the installer. You should first install gcc, make and kernel-sources before you try the installer, though.

Agree on the whole - here's my one in a million counterexample: 13C grade 1 listed building: Basically laying cables and drilling holes in the walls is a big no-no.

Is that unusual enough to be the exception that proves the rule?

BTW, I don't alas actually own or live in such a building. I just know about the computer setup in one.

See her please http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=462109&page=3

Oh and anyone know about many IRQ messages on this system?

And where can I get drivers for my TV Tuner card?