Any experience with "Asus A8N-SLi" or "Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI" mobos?

[Mark Magiera]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 19:33:38 +0000
Mark Magiera <mark at hyow.eu.org> wrote:

> I'm finally planning on upgrading to a 64bit system this wekeend
> however I'm looking for a motherboard that is high performance for
> gaming in windows, but also has the hardware support in FreeBSD since
> I'll be running that most of the time.
> 
> The thing I'm unsure about is, how well are the nforce4 chipsets
> supported in FreeBSD? and what about PCI-E, would one of those mobo's
> in combination with a PCI-E nvidia card work?
> 
> Also, I'm planning on running this on a RELENG_5 installation, would I
> be better off with a HEAD install?
> I'd rather stick with freebsd 5.x but if it doesn't support PCI-E or
> something and freebsd 6 does, I'll probably end up going with that.
> 
> Any advice would be much appreciated
> 
> -- Mark Magiera

Ok, quick update. I finally bought the mobo (Asus A8N-SLi) along with a
6600GT PCI-E and while there are a few problems, they seem the kind that
can be ironed out over time.
Basically, freebsd installs in both 32 and 64 bit mode but in both
cases, the network card is so unrelaible that half way through a cvsup
(or anything else) it dies and nothing (that I know of) but a reboot
fixes it, this is for the "sk" device. As for the other nic (the nforce
one), I didn't look into it much but it seems there's no driver for it
except one possibly (ports/net/nvnet) but since I'm unable to even do a
simple cvsup with the other card, it's not much use. Also the nvnet
driver is for 32bit mode only.

For some further testing, I booted a FreeSBIE cd (to see if the GPU
worked) and X/xfce4 ran on that flawlesly, probabaly not with the nvidia
driver but still good to know.

Basically, if anyone's going for a 64 bit install with similair
hardware, forget about it if you rely on network access or unless
either the "sk" drivers are updated to a state where they work better,
or you have all distfiles and a recent snapshot of ports on cd.
For a 32bit install I guess you might be ok if you got the nvidia nic to
work (I didn't get it working but then again I didn't play much), which
you would still need a cd with distfiles on it since the other nic won't
last long enough to download them, or a pci nic I guess.

I may try putting in a proper pci nic if I have time, but for now this
is all the info I have. I hope it helps anyone seeking information on
this hardware combined with freebsd.

Apologies if anyone finds this irrelevant but I beleive there had been
no information about the usage of this mobo until now and others might
find this useful should they be contemplating a similair purchase

-- Mark Magiera

PS. If I find anything out that contradicts anything I've said, I'll
post it. Other than that, for now you can consider this mobo working,
except both nic's are either non-functional or almost unusable (depeding
on which nic you use)