Should I go with an intel or asus motherboard for optimal performance under linux in a high end system that I will be putting together myself? so far I found an intel board that supports up to 8 gigs ram, its the "Intel D975XBXLKR" model.. I plan to run an intel core 2 duo processor in it and not overclock it. Will linux care if its an asus or an intel motherboard? My last 2 computers I had asus motherboards thats and I didnt have any major problems with them, so I know asus is a good company too.. what are your thoughts?

Claudio

I heard before that amd and nvidia have better support for linux than intel and ati. As for ATI things might change since nvidia bought them. For my experience, I can say that linux runs better on nvidia video cards than ati cards. I've heard also that intel base mobo and processors runs slower than amd and nvidia. A lot of people says that intel is more inclined toward ms than linux.

I don't know where you heard this, but it's completely false. Did you mean to say "since AMD merged with them"?

Yes, I heard it from suseforums.net when I was using suse linux 10.

That would mean one graphics chip maker, very, very bad.

AMD did buy ATI though. Which seems like a good thing for computers.

Actually, the acquisition/merger of ATI by AMD has not gone through:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/V...112319,00.html

If they both have the intel chipset, either one should work fine. Honestly, the majority of motherboards will work without trouble, and only a few will give you small problems with specific components. The good news is that the more time passes, the less likely those problems are to show up. If you want to make sure, however, search for "(motherboard name) linux trouble" and see if that brings up anything.

um, people, he's asking about performance not compatability.

cizzi, perfomance is tricky, and while a mobo does play a part, it's certainly not the biggest part. Check review sites like Tom Hardware and Anandtech that often do shootouts to compair high end components. Pick the board you like, then try and match or beat the specs they used to build it. Memory, HDD, and video card choice generaly have a MUCH larger performance impact than mainboard, especialy if the bord options have the same chipset. And, a mobo is a mobo, there is not likely to be a difference between windows and linux performance just by switching a mobo

Linux doesn't care if the motherboard was maked by asus or by intel,
What inflence the performence of linux is what chipset does the motherboard use,if the motherboard has any controller or codec unit that linux can't drive it well.

I have installed various distros of linux over the last few years and as long as the chipsets are from intel it's a safe bet that it will work perfectly well first time. The limited exposure I have had with VIA and SIS chipsets on mother boards seems to provide perfectly workable solutions, so far everything has worked for me. In fact I have never had a failure with: Fedora, Ubuntu, Susi, Mandriver (formally Mandrake) these will install easily and with much less fuss that windows. However, really new chipsets may not work perfectly with linux if the drivers have not been written for them yet. This said, as long as you use a new version of your preferred version of Linux, I would expect it to work perfectly for all your main hardware. If you have any specialized hardware you may have a problem. Linux people generally love to help each other out, so if this is the case post a request and I would be very surprised if no one responded.
I hope this helps.

while it's true that linux doens't care, there are implementation differences between vendors for the same chipset that affect performance. while this question is valid, it maybe is asked in the wrong place/context.

The intel board will have pretty much a full intel chipset without a lot of support chips from other manufacturers..

Gigabyte, Asus, etc.. mix and match. so even with a 975 Chipset motherboard you may end up witha broadcom NIC, a Promise SATA Controller, a VIA something or other etc.. etc..

So I would agree whatever board you go with you really need to sit down and look at WHAT chips they are using on the board for what functions.. and are they ALL supported in Linux. Would hate to try ind install Linux to your new system on the SATA drive only to discover the chipset for the SATA controller isn't supported on the install CD.. OUCH !!

I have noticed a couple sites mentioning there is a bug in the i965 chipset that Linux doesn't play well with. although there is a kernel patch to work around it.. so the i975 would be a better choice.

While someone mentioned you were asking about performance and not compatability I believe the two go hand in hand. My experience with Intel motherboards has been good overall. They may not always perform as fast as boards from other manufacturers, but driver support for their board is good, they are extremely stable. no complaints here. I'll gladly give up a tiny bit of performance to gain stability and compatability.

For performance feature rankings I usually look at a site like motherboards.org or more specifically. http://www.motherboards.org/ranking/.../Intel7752006/

Asus 975 board
----------------
Intel's ICH7R South Bridge controls four of the SATA ports - RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 modes.
Asus also includes a Marvell 88SE6141 SATA/ATA controller 4 more SATA ports
Onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC882M High Definition 8-channel CODEC.
ASUS decided to have a Texas Instruments controller for the IEEE-1394 ports,
a Marvell controller for each LAN controller.
A lot of mixing and matching going on if you don't mind that..

Intel board..
--------
Intel® ICH7 SATA-II/300, 4 Ports, RAID-0, 1, 0+1, 5, Matrix RAID
Intel® 82573E/82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Intel® 82801 Integrated High Definition Audio


Ultimately it's your choice since you have to live with it. a couple fps isn't going to kill me.
Best of luck in your search.

Any Linux distros I have tried always installed easy on 939 & Nvid for me. 2GB DDR400 OC'd ~500. My LT Intel/Asus is another story though!
But poor support for Dual DVI LCD on install DVDs!
Vista ULTIMATE appears faster running on LT than any of my x2 DT! Heard vista geared for gamers, not much hope for corporate. vista is RAM, HD HOG thus I hope more migrators fairly soon. IMHO a SMOKING fast stripped down Linux Gamer version & Redmond Wa would be out of work!
IMHO Synthetic BM are fairly useless in the real world,. Up til now WinXP only RECOGNIZED ~3.25GB ram, but used less in actual working.
The Pentium M CPU on i915 took much less power, ran COOLER than DT and came close to matching work performance for the price. Hopefully new LT CPU will have similar options.
Running 8GB gets hot, is $$$, what real benefit for user?

MY Intel D945GNTK.. board has had three patches to the bios in 4 months. When I first obtained it, the bios would lockup if an arrow key was pressed during the boot process. That first patch provided a partial repair. The second patch fixed up more of the problems and the third patch appears to make the bios very stable. Since that last patch, all is OK. It took almost three years for Intel to clean up their mother board bios, since the first release of the board was for 2004.

On the other-hand, the AMD with award bios, worked correctly right out of the box. It was simple to setup, with documentation. The Intel bios comes with absolutely zero documentation about setup parameters.

And you cannot reach Intel directly for help.

Buyer beware. Check on the net if others recommend the MOBO you want to purchase.

Leslie

Intel's motherboards are blah and the price tag is too high.

I suggest Abit AW8D. I never had problems with Abit besides capacitor problem but that does not count.

I think Abit AW8D has majority of its hardware working in Linux. Also it is cheaper than ASUS.

Intel Core 2 Duo processor does not work well in a 64-bit OS. Only 64-bit OS can allocate 8 GB of RAM. Even if you got 8 GB of RAM, the reliability and stability will suffer. A multi-core processor or multi-processor system needs ECC memory at the very least. If you get non-ECC memory, the system will have crashes all the time.

An Intel Core 2 Due E6600 is the best buy for performance and power efficiency. You could get an E6800, but the power efficiency is worst than Athlon FX-60.

The performance of a computer depends mostly on the hard drive. I suggest two Western Digital 'Raptor' 74 GB SATA hard drives in RAID-1. For even more performance (actually increase throughput and data capacity), four Western Digital 'Raptor' 74 GB SATA in RAID-10.

Right now, whatever you buy now will not be the performance king in the future.