Buying a new motherboard

Cichlid · 07-24-2002, 11:50 AM

Well, I fried my MB. My CPU fan konked out on my and well you know the rest. A friend of mine recommends the following board;

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/produc...-6330%20Ver5.0

It sound all fine and dandy, but is it all compatible with Linux? I'm told that I'm lucky that my old Promise card was detected and worked fine. So now I juts have concerns that I may get a new board that does not have linux software written for it yet.

Any comments are appreciated,

Erik

MrJoshua · 07-24-2002, 12:42 PM

I my self have been looking at getting an MSI board for AMD procs. I would recommend the MSI KT3 Ultra It is very very sweet!
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/produc...MODEL=MS-6380E

finegan · 07-24-2002, 08:13 PM

The First board is straightforward, 100% supported kit from what I can tell. In the case of the second, the VT8233A chipset is having some issues under the 2.4.18 kernel that get resolved in 2.4.19-rcX, which is fine for Gentoo as they release on bleeding edge kernels, but may be a hastle with one of the other major distros as they are all currently released on 2.4.18.

Cheers,

Finegan

MrJoshua · 07-24-2002, 08:24 PM

Good point I am sorry that I did not mention that, but I planned on using Gentoo on my new box anyway. There is also an issue with the new boards and the GeForce 4 MX chipsets.

finegan · 07-24-2002, 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by MrJoshua
There is also an issue with the new boards and the GeForce 4 MX chipsets.

Got a Link for that? We just can't let anything wander in to canon 'round here without a full disclosure.

Cheers,

Finegan

MrJoshua · 07-24-2002, 11:29 PM

It seems that the article I was reading today simply mentioned the MX cards were not DirectX 8 or 8.1 compliant, so that really does not mean anything to the Linux world. Here it is if you wanna read it. I will try to find the other one I found.
http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID=165

Cichlid · 08-16-2002, 11:39 PM

WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP. An no luck.
So I tried to work with the MSI board. I couldn't complete an install without errors. I tried (trying) a ECS K7S5A board, PIECE of CRAP. I get a kernal panic, I tried a different version of my dirtso (SuSE) adn I was back to the install errors. The ppl at the store are getting cheesed with me because I keep returning the mobos. I think I may just exchanged once more and get my original Asus A7V again.

Erik

fool_inteligent · 08-17-2002, 07:03 AM

i am using
MS-6368 for P3
and having no problem at all in any version.
but just the graphics are not so good in redhat 7.0.
and via chipset is great for linux users not like intel chipset.

geoff-taylor@ho · 08-17-2002, 08:24 AM

From personal experience a now on the third MB which is sweet definatley forget the ECS K7S5A, it is a piece of junk, SuSE 7.3 would not install on it without errors, when I did get it going it was as stable as rock on a house of cards. The Biostar M7 sometng was just as bad, UDMA caused no end of lock up, the ASUS A7A 266E i am using now is superb, tuned for flat out and rock solid. Thats my 2 penneth for MB's...

Geoff

geoff-taylor@ho · 08-17-2002, 08:25 AM

Looks like I amy need a new KB though, apolgies for the spelling in the last post.

Cichlid · 08-17-2002, 08:40 PM

Well, I'm ashamed to say that I broke the cardinal rule of trouble shooting. I assumed that all hardware was OK just because it was new. I didn't go through the trouble of taking out my RAM to see if the trouble laid there. And sure enough, it did. I will exchange my PC133 SDRAM stick of 512 and start from scratch. Since I found it was the RAM I an now runnign on a ECS K7S5A. I was able to install SuSE 8.0 without a glitch :-)

Thanks all for you patience with me while I ranted and raved, and bitched

finegan · 08-17-2002, 10:37 PM

Just about everything short of RAM is easy to debug with readout from the kernel's dmesg, PSUs going wonky but not dying is another one, un-reliable BIOSes on mobos another, but that usually is common info as its a hardware bug not a piece of specifically broken gear. I highly recommend a cute little utility called memtest:

www.memtest86.com

It installs to a floopy, you boot that floppy and it moves its testing image around through the ram so everything gets checked... brilliant toy.

Cheers,

Finegan

geoff-taylor@ho · 08-18-2002, 06:21 AM

Glad you got the K7S5A running, no way no how would it run for me, some boards apparently did have problems with matching and required some surgery under the processor socket, I went through 2 sticks of ram with memtest spewing errors in the same place., main thing is your up and running..

Geoff