[Fwd: Looking to upgrade my hardware and run 6.2-RELEASE]

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 09:56:22PM -0500, Glenn Sieb wrote:
> I said...
> > Since I tend to build my own boxes, I'd like to make sure my choice of
> > CPU/MB is good fro FBSD before I buy :-)
> > 
> > I'm looking at an AMD X2 64 5400 and an Abit AN9 32X.
> > 
> > The AN9 has:
> > 
> > NVIDIA nForce SPP 190/nForce 590 SLI MCP
> > Dual NV Gigabit LAN

The nve(4) driver supports the following chipsets:
     o   nForce
     o   nForce2
     o   nForce3
     o   nForce4

It doesn't look like nForce5 is supported yet.

> > 6x SATA 3gb/s ports with RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD support
> > (plus 2x SATA ports non-RAID)

The ata(4) driver supports the following chipsets:
    nVidia:         nForce, nForce2, nForce2 MCP, nForce3, nForce3 MCP,
                     nForce3 Pro, nForce4.

No nForce5 here either. 

> > I know that NVIDIA chipsets (at least used to) require separate
> > downloads of the chipset drivers. Is this still the case?

According to nve(4):

     This driver is a reimplementation of the NVIDIA supported Linux nvnet
     driver and uses the same closed source API library to access the underly-
     ing hardware.  There is currently no programming documentation available
     for this device, and therefore little is known about the internal archi-
     tecture of the MAC engine itself.

> > I've been using Abit MBs for years now, but I'm not necessarily tied to
> > them, if there are better suggestions from the list.

Looks like you'd better stick with a KN9 (nForce4) for now.

Asus has the M2V-MX with VIA chipset that looks OK. Not sure about the
Realtek RTL8100C ethernet chip though. Same goes for the MSI K9VGM-V. It has
a RTL8201 ethernet chip.

I've never had trouble with MSI mobos with VIA chipsets. They might not be
the fastest, but generally everything works. AMD chipsets are fine as well.


Roland

-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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