Recommendations?

[Coleman Kane]

On 4/15/05, Astrodog <astrodog at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/15/05, Florent Thoumie <flz at xbsd.org> wrote:
> > Le Friday 15 April 2005 à 14:16 -0700, David O'Brien a écrit :
> > > On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 06:09:04PM -0700, Astrodog wrote:
> > > > On 4/14/05, David O'Brien <obrien at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > > > On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 03:14:45PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smrgrav wrote:
> > > > > > Jung-uk Kim <jkim at niksun.com> writes:
> > > > > > > Stay away from nForce chipsets.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Please stop spreading this little piece of disinformation.  nForce3
> > > > > > motherboards such as the Asus SK8N should work fine.
> > > > >
> > > > > DES stop spreading FUD.
> > > >
> > > > I think the point to be made here, is that there are SOME specific
> > > > nforce based boards, that work great,
> > >
> > > There are?  Which??  The SK8N that DES will respond to my email is
> > > actually high on the "bizzare issues" list.
> >
> >         I have an Asus A8N-SLI (nforce4) Motherboard based box running
> >         5-STABLE for some time now. Issues are :
> >         x ACPI (quite common),
> >         x Sound (not much a problem since I have an Emu10K1 based sound
> >         card which is far better),
> >         x Network (sk0 works fine, but not should-be-nv0),
> >         x USB (no clue, I'm not using it ATM but firewire works).
> >
> >         The system is totally usable, I have a Geforce 6600 PCI-E and
> >         the whole thing runs Xorg 6.8.2 with nv driver. I'm totally
> >         happy with it.
> >
> >         As Dag-Erling said, it'll be good if you were not giving false
> >         information and better (my opinion), as re-amd64@ if you were
> >         trying to get better relationship with Nvidia.
> >
> > --
> > Florent Thoumie
> > flz at xbsd.org
> 
> You listed 4 issues that quite a few people wouldn't want to deal
> with... ACPI is a nightmare unto itself, Lotsa people use onboard
> sound, the nv ethernet stuff should work now, and USB is important.
> 
> NVidia support would be much, much better, if nvidia provided the
> documentation the FreeBSD team needs to get those things fixed, or if
> they provided even binary drivers and kernel modules.
> 
> The fact that those 4 issues come up, safely demonstrates that the
> board is not well supported, although it may work.
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> 

The issues with *certain* nforce boards and chipsets are numerous. I
believe the poster was specifically asking for a recommendation. In my
experience with this problem the nforce boards seems to be much more
problematic than the VIA boards. In addition, the problems aren't
necessarily amd64 issues (since some of the athlonxp boards with the
same nforce chipset have the same issues).

My recommendation would be to not "play roulette" with the available
nforce boards, but instead get the VIA based system instead.

Perhaps a large group of prefessionals recommending the competitor's
solution because it has a much higher statistical success rate might
actually entice nvidia to open up and either:
1) Fix the existing problems
or
2) Give more documentation to the group.

Anyhow, my recommendation is also to stay away from nforce boards. The
VIA boards seem quite successful and stable. Now, if you don't want to
take my advice that's your perogative, but my advice is still the same
(and I don't consider it FUD).

--
coleman