Hello,

I wanted to share my recent experience with this motherboard:

Chaintech S1689 ULi Socket 939 ATX Motherboard / Audio / AGP 8x/4x / 10/100 Ethernet LAN / USB2.0 / Serial ATA / RAID

This motherboard, while dirt cheap ($70), uses the ULi chipset rather than the popular nVidia or VIA BIOS. This turned out to be a major problem.

I tried installing the following linux distros: Gentoo 2004-3 r1, Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora 3. Mandrake and Fedora simply hung. In four days I couldn't get Gentoo to recognize my SATA HD and booting with gentoo doscsi or doataraid noapic caused the system to hang. I also tried FreeBSD, and while it installed and recognized the HD, I could not get it to recognize my Ethernet device. I may have eventually got it to work but it also crashed while installing KDE from the CD so I took that as an omen and gave up.

While I'm not a linux guru by any stretch of the imagination, I have RedHat linux on my other machine and have been using Unix-like systems at work for years.

One of the helpful fellas on the Gentoo.org forum was convinced the BIOS was the problem.

In contrast, Windows XP installed without any problems. But for Linux I would recommend that you avoid this motherboard.

I returned the motherboard and ordered a Gigabyte MB with nVidia BIOS instead.

Ed

Thanks for the post. The hardware forum is not quite the right place for it though. Linuxquestions.org also host a Hardware Compatibility List (or HCL) that is meant for posts like this. I realize that you posted this to help others out, but it would be easier for potential Chaintech buyers to find if it was in the HCL. You may want to post this there.

On a side note: my Soyo board has nearly the opposite problem. Linux runs fine, but Windows won't boot!

Ooops, my mistake. I am new to the board and didn't see find that part of the website until you told me about it. I wish I knew about the HCL section before, it would have saved me the trouble of buying that MB!

I have posted the message in the appropriate section. Forum moderator please delete this thread.

Ed

Hi TATAAA - Welcome to LQ! It is the policy of LQ to never delete any threads*, and while the post wasn't a Linux question, there's no harm in posting your comment here. As gd2shoe pointed out though, specific hardware reviews are better suited to the HCL, and I would encourage you to submit your experiences there. The difference is that posts in the individual forums are sorted in time order (most recent first) while the HCL entries are listed in alphabetical order and are (in a sense) time-independent. -- J.W.

* the only exception to this policy would be if the thread represented a serious violation of the LQ Rules, such as illegal activity, etc.