I was just looking at an MSI K8N nForce4 board with AMD 3500+. Reasonably priced around $150 on the Bay of E:
http://cgi.ebay.com/MSI-K8N-Neo4-nFo...QQcmdZViewItem

Just not sure I need to be that bleeding edge right now. Amazing what you get for the money these days though.

Weird thought of the day: If you could take one of those mobos back in time just 10 years the CIA would probably pay you a million bucks for it.

The plan for AMD-ATI merger DID get CLEARANCES to push through. The entire matter is now being discussed by ATI shareholders. The transaction will be complete by November 2006.

Before long the choices are going to be Intel, Asus, Foxconn and ECS. Behold::

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/..._sink_or_swim/

You need ever vigilant trust busting or free markets will eventually turn into oligopoly/monopoly controlled rackets. At which point there's no longer anything free about the marketplace.

Unfortunately all our politicians are on the take...

Is the latest version of fedora a 64-bit OS which would make use of the intel core 2 duo and address 4 to 8 gigs of ram?

Any 64-bit OS can handle more than 4 GB of memory. I do not know if Fedora developers selected high memory support up to 64 GB, so you are on your own.

I suggest Gentoo for some added reliability when using 64-bit programs. By using Gentoo, you know what programs are 64-bit safe and which programs are not 64-bit safe.

A 64-bit OS is still experimental. Not all 32-bit programs in Linux can be compile for a 64-bit version nicely.

The reason why a 32-bit OS like Window XP can only use 3.2 GB from the 4 GB of RAM is because of PAE. If PAE is not used, all 32-bit processors can handle up to 4 GB of memory with out any virtual memory. Linux uses virtual machine to handle many tasks. If you have 4 GB of RAM, Linux will split it up into two sections. One will be for user space and other will be kernel space. Normally user space is 3 GB and kernel space is 1 GB, but this can be changed before compiling the kernel.

ECS, Foxconn, Biostar are horrible motherboard brands. I do not like ASUS boards too. I suggest getting motherboards from either ABIT (Universal ABIT) or Gigabyte.

Buying motherboards or processors from ebay is risky unless it is in bulk.

I run both 32 and 64 bit linux. Both are reliable. The 64 bit version is as good or better than others. But, with all distributions, not all 32 bit programs have their 64 bit counterparts.

With the applied patches to the Intel MOBO bios, which has an intel 930d processor I have no problems that I am aware of. Only one message occurs with booting about pci code not being

PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at f0000000 is not E820-reserved
PCI: Not using MMCONFIG.
PCI: Using configuration type 1
Setting up standard PCI resources

Searching the web seems to indicate that it is not a bug.

Who can tell me?

can someone give me a specific model # of a motherboard they would buy that supports the intel core 2 duo cpu and runs fine under fc6?

I'm not aware of any that don't work well, so long as you update the BIOS first thing. Might be easier to find a list of mobo's with known driver issues. I don't even bother to check mainboards for linux compat anymore, even several years ago I didn't encounter anything that coulnd't be worked around.

MSI 945P Neo3-F LGA 775 Intel 945P ATX Intel Motherboard

It's an off-brand, so "let the buyer beware" and all that. It's been my experience that even good mobo manufacturers can put out crappy boards, so I buy what's cheap but meets/exceeds my requirements. This board has 4 dimm slots, an intel chipset (makes life easier for linux, i've found), up to 1066 bus speed, and won't break the bank.

MSI is not an off brand, I've been using them for years at work and they are generaly great boards. However, MSI is known for shipping a buggy bios so definatly update it right away. I've got one dual athlon that I used for 2+ years as a workstation and now it's almost a year in as a file server (upgraded workstation with a amdx2 on an MSI board) and I've never had a problem with it. it runs 24/7 with the only reboots for kernel upgrades, extended power outages, and when vmware accessing a floppy drive decides to make it reboot (it did this on my previous system too, a dual p3 Tyan board, which is now a happy web server). I've also got several MSI's as CAD workstations and accounting workstation, also running 24/7. CAD people and accounts don't take well to system crashes so if there were a reliability problem, I would definatly hear about it.

how about the asus p5b base model? it has what i need and uses the P965 chipset, will fc6 work fine with it? i need the onboard audio and nic to work

claudio

Just wanted to let you guys know I bought the intel desktop DP965LT motherboard and everything works fine with fc6 64-bit. All the onboard features as well.

Thanks.

This thread is a bit old. Is today situation with Motherboards for Linux getting better?

First of all, today is 10 April 2008, and there is no AMD desktop Processors anymore

Some local stores here in North Germany do not even have AMD processors and all they have is Intel Dual/Quad Core E6XXX/E8XXX/E9XXX for Desktop PCs and Celeron/E2XXX/E4XXX for budget solutions.

That means, for many people there is no need to take into account the motherboards for AMD processors.

As first conclusion after reading this and other related threads:
-------------------------------------
* Intel Motherboards are bad (bad support, bad BIOS)
* Asus hates Open Source and intentionally do not support Linux
* Gygabyte has bad support for Linux, only binary drivers available.
* Nvidia chipsets are bad for Linux.


I am Gentoo Linux user and I will prefer to have as few proprietary hardware drivers as possible. Do exist such motherboards which are stable, has serial and parallel ports and are Linux friendly?

intel's chipsets are very well supported in linux. the GMA graphics were one of the first to have accelerated fully opensource drivers, sponsored by Intel even.

nforce 1 and 2 were a bit weird, and parts of the nforce, like the NIC, are not good performers, but linux support is fine.

gigabyte and asus take chipsets and put them on mainboards. they do not actually make drivers, but rebrand the chipset and component drivers for the parts they use.

I would not hesitate to try and run linux on any desktop or server board, and would be very surprised to find one that doesn't at least mostly work. laptop's are another story, laptop vendors have space and power and heat requirements to worry about and often heavily modify the components they use, sometimes going as far as to change the hardware ID's so that the component makers reference drivers won't even recognize the hardware. this is part of why some laptops that come with Vista won't even run XP and linux on them is a mixed bag.

IMO, "today[s] situation with Motherboards for Linux" is "don't worry about it".