Mainboard suggestions?

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Wednesday 15 September 2004 07:39, John Wilson wrote:
> I am currently in the process of spec'ing a new machine for myself and wish
> to go the AMD64 way.  Unfortunately, trying to find good information on
> the myriad of mainboards that are available is giving me a serious
> headache. :)

There are really only two types: nvidia nforce 3 and via kt800 based boards. 
There are a few sub-variations in those chipsets, but in general if you look 
at the benchmarks on all them the differences within one family are marginal 
at best (like 3%).

> platform come from either Asus or MSI.  My original goal was to find a
> board with the minimum of additional features onboard, save for sound and a
> NIC. Firewire is useless to me.

It's hard to get away from all the builtins; most boards that I'd trust (ie. 
not stuff from elitegroup) end up with all the bells and whistles. My 
firewire ports lie idle as well.

> - Which is the better chipset for FreeBSD, the Via offering or the NVidia
> one?

nforce3 _had_ issues, that's for sure (oh, and I can't speak for any of the 
RAID support).

> - It appears that Asus has problems with their onboard NIC as well; there
> were a few messages posted to the list in regard to this.  Is this still a
> problem? Should I avoid Asus because of this?

The asus k8v SE has an sk0 onboard that had been reported to be wonky. I had 
stability problems with it about a month ago, haven't recreated the problem 
recently (mostly for lack of trying).


-- 
Don't worry, 't ain't no shame to be stupid - ol' mouse.
    GPG: FEA2 A3FE Adriaan de Groot