Mainboard suggestions?

[Freddie Cash]

On September 15, 2004 01:39 am, John Wilson wrote:
>From what I've been able to gather, the two best mainboards for the
> AMD64 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.

The MSI Master series of mobos work very nicely with FreeBSD, both in 
32-bit and 64-bit mode.  We have a handful of the Master dual-AthlonMP 
boards, and a pair of the Master dual-Opteron boards.  All deveices on 
the mobo as detected and usuable under FreeBSD 5.2.1 and 5.3.  The VIA 
K8T800 chipset is very stable in our testing, and the SATA support is 
decent (didn't stress it much, but never had any problems with it).

> - It seems that a lot of the MSI boards use Realtek audio and NIC's. 
> Are these any good?  Are they at all supported?  My understanding was
> that Realtek was on the crappy side, but I've no personal experience
> with them.

The MSI boards we have don't use rl(4).  The AthlonMP boards have fxp(4) 
NICs onboard, and the Opteron boards have bge(4) NICs.  Don't know 
about the audio, though, as I disabled it in the BIOS before ever 
installing anything.

-- 
Freddie Cash, CCNT CCLP        Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73             (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca