Motherboard Recomendation

[Don Lewis]

On  9 May, Tom Samplonius wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 9 May 2003, Alvin Gunkel wrote:
> 
>> Great, that's what I get for editing the first draft!  The system has an
>> Athlon XP 1900 processor in it, so the new motherboard would need to
>> support that.
>> 
>> Alvin
> 
> 
>   Well, get a ASUS or Tyan motherboard.  ASUS has a nice one based on the
> NVIDIA chipset (nForce2?).  Try to find something that can use ECC memory.
> Your RAM could be bad, and your motherboard is fine, but since you aren't
> using ECC, you wouldn't know.

Athlon motherboards that support ECC RAM are very rare.  The VIA
chipsets that most of them use is supposed to support ECC, but none of
the motherboards that I've found that use the VIA chipsets support ECC.
I'm not sure if the problem is that the BIOS writers never added support
or if the motherboard vendors ommitted the necessary board traces, or if
there are problems with the implementation in this chipset.  The only
motherboards that I've found with ECC RAM support are based on the AMD
760, which is getting a bit dated.  

One motherboard that I've been happy with is the Gigabyte GA7-DX+
(GA7-DXR+ if you want onboard RAID and a few extra goodies).  It'll take
up PC-2100 RAM and is fairly inexpensive.