Socket AM2 motherboards -- best chipset for Linux, BSD?

[kony]

Well, if Asus are the type of company who would knowingly put a bad
product on the market and try to cover it up by rigging the software
(not that I'm saying that's the case), that would certainly affect my
decision to buy one of their boards.

You're prematurely jumping to conclusions.

The chipset will have same cooling requirement regardless of
manufacturer, judge only on whether their 'sink was
especially worse than anybody else's.

 

[Igor]

Well, it is displayed temperature in the BIOS vs. an infrared
thermometer directly on top of the chipset cooler. I am fairly
sure my measurements are correct.

I trust your measurement. That's quite the discrepancy alright.

Faulty sensor? Software bug? Deliberate deception? I wonder which it
is.

 

[Igor]

Who cares? you're acting as if this is important.

The only real factor is whether the chipset stays cool
enough to be stable, and if it does not, whether Asus would
rectify the situation or the owner would have to seek an
alternate chipset heatsink instead.

Well, if Asus are the type of company who would knowingly put a bad
product on the market and try to cover it up by rigging the software
(not that I'm saying that's the case), that would certainly affect my
decision to buy one of their boards.

 

[Stefan Patric]

Yes. I'm trying to build the whole thing (including monitor, mouse,
etc.) for under $1000.

I build my current system in January for about $600 US, excluding
monitor. I could have done it for about $150 less, but there was a big
electronics/computer convention in town, and they bought up every stick
of DDR2 RAM in the city. Had to wait two weeks for the stores to
resupply and pay full retail to boot: $250 for 2 gigs. Same stuff is
selling "on special" now for about $80.

As far as specs: After much research, I went with the Abit KN9, AM2
socket motherboard with the nVidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, SATA and IDE,
RAID, 160 GB SATA HD, 80GB IDE HD (from the "old" machine. used mainly
for backups), IDE DVD burner, 8 GB RAM max, AMD Athlon 64 (single core)
CPU. Bought everything through Newegg, except the graphics card, a
GeForce 6600 256 MB PCI-X, which I got used -- one month old -- from one
of the guys in the local Linux users group ($50!!!), RAM as mentioned
above, and keyboard and mouse.

It's been running almost continuously since mid-January, except for 3
weeks in May, when I went on vacation and shut it down, and have yet to
have any problems or over-heating.

Oh! And Fedora Core 6 64-bit.

Stef

 

[Igor]

I build my current system in January for about $600 US, excluding
monitor. I could have done it for about $150 less, but there was a big
electronics/computer convention in town, and they bought up every stick
of DDR2 RAM in the city. Had to wait two weeks for the stores to
resupply and pay full retail to boot: $250 for 2 gigs. Same stuff is
selling "on special" now for about $80.

Note to self: Don't buy memory when there's a big computer convention
in town.

As far as specs: After much research, I went with the Abit KN9, AM2
socket motherboard with the nVidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, SATA and IDE,
RAID, 160 GB SATA HD, 80GB IDE HD (from the "old" machine. used mainly
for backups), IDE DVD burner, 8 GB RAM max, AMD Athlon 64 (single core)
CPU. Bought everything through Newegg, except the graphics card, a
GeForce 6600 256 MB PCI-X, which I got used -- one month old -- from one
of the guys in the local Linux users group ($50!!!), RAM as mentioned
above, and keyboard and mouse.

It's been running almost continuously since mid-January, except for 3
weeks in May, when I went on vacation and shut it down, and have yet to
have any problems or over-heating.

Oh! And Fedora Core 6 64-bit.

The Abit KN9 looks like a decent board, and it's good to know there
aren't any problems under Fedora Core 6. I wish it had a serial port!
How well does the abit Silent OTES heatpipe system work?

The two boards that have interested me the most so far in my searches
are the Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 and the ASROCK ALiveNF5-eSATA2+.
Unfortunately, it seems that, whenever I find a board that has
everything I want, there's always a fly in the ointment.

According to user reviews on Newegg.com, the Gigabyte board doesn't
quite follow the ATX standard (even though it claims to) and so it
doesn't quite fit a standard size case. Not a deal breaker if true,
but I'd rather have something that fits the case properly.

The ASRock board has relatively tedious procedures for disabling the
onboard RAID and preparing SATA drives. Both procedures require a
floppy drive, and I was hoping to dispense with the floppy drive on
this machine. I've also read at least one report of problems running
Linux on this board. I'm sure there are workarounds, but I don't want
the hassle.

I'm starting to get tired of reading manuals. I may just get a plain
but predictable board that has the bare essentials. I've seen a few
from ECS and Biostar that would probably fit the bill.

 

[Andy]

Note to self: Don't buy memory when there's a big computer convention
in town.


The Abit KN9 looks like a decent board, and it's good to know there
aren't any problems under Fedora Core 6. I wish it had a serial port!
How well does the abit Silent OTES heatpipe system work?

The two boards that have interested me the most so far in my searches
are the Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 and the ASROCK ALiveNF5-eSATA2+.
Unfortunately, it seems that, whenever I find a board that has
everything I want, there's always a fly in the ointment.

According to user reviews on Newegg.com, the Gigabyte board doesn't
quite follow the ATX standard (even though it claims to) and so it
doesn't quite fit a standard size case. Not a deal breaker if true,
but I'd rather have something that fits the case properly.

I have the GA-M61P-S3 and have installed it in two different ATX cases
without any mounting hole problem. I don't know why some of the
reviewers think the board is micro ATX. There is also one guy
complaining the board is rectangular.
My primary complaint with this board is the BIOS does not enumerate
the hard disks correctly. Other than that, the board's all right.

 

[Arno Wagner]

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:31:40 -0700, Igor


You're prematurely jumping to conclusions.

The chipset will have same cooling requirement regardless of
manufacturer, judge only on whether their 'sink was
especially worse than anybody else's.

I think the heatsink is pretty good. It seems this chipset is just way
over the top in its power consumption.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

On 21 Oct 2007 02:04:53 GMT, Arno Wagner <[email protected]>
wrote:

More likely it's just measuring the wrong (a different)
chip, or the bios has a bug as many do. It's not likely to
be "underhanded" in any way. I'd imagine Asus would rather
the system integrator can tell what's wrong instead of
causing addt'l RMAs due to the board seemingly
malfunctioning.

The measurement may be correct, but the top of a chipset
cooler doesn't necessarily give usable data unless you
happened to know the exact C/W rating of the heatsink, and
that as-installed including the thermal interface
effectiveness.

More importantly, is it instable as a result? We don't have
a number from you, but a lot of people do jump to
conclusions about something being too hot when too hot
usually means above 70C (unless you're overclocking, making
peak stable operation more dependant on lower temp).

Oh, you are right. The chip will be warmer than the cooler,
making the gap between displayed temperature and actual
chip temerature even larger.

As to instabilities, I don't know. I had several crashes
before I specifically tunneled outside air on the cooler
by the CPU. This reduced the temperature by about 10C,
something which the pretty good CPU cooler could not do.

Since then, no crashes.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

But thats the cooler temperature and not the chip temperature, those will be
different, the first one having a lower temperature.

Yes indeed. That makes the observed gap between displayed
chip temerature and actual chip temperature even larger.
After all the cooler is already 15C above the reported chip
temperature.

Arno

 

[kony]

I think the heatsink is pretty good. It seems this chipset is just way
over the top in its power consumption.

I definitely wouldn't call it a cool running chipset but
there are quite a few boards w/same out there which don't
have this problem. I would suspect one of three things:

1) Poorer than average case ventilation
2) Specific model of board has inferior heatsink
3) Chipset voltage regulation subcircuit has a feedback
resistor that's a little out of spec, raising the voltage a
bit beyond what the target was.

I'd tend to suspect #1 the most since a duct helped.

 

[Arno Wagner]

On 25 Oct 2007 16:05:56 GMT, Arno Wagner <[email protected]>
wrote:


I definitely wouldn't call it a cool running chipset but
there are quite a few boards w/same out there which don't
have this problem. I would suspect one of three things:

1) Poorer than average case ventilation
2) Specific model of board has inferior heatsink
3) Chipset voltage regulation subcircuit has a feedback
resistor that's a little out of spec, raising the voltage a
bit beyond what the target was.

I'd tend to suspect #1 the most since a duct helped.

I am pretty sure 2) and 3) are not the case. 1) might be,
since it is a pretty old case from an area where
ventilation was not that critical. It is also
isnulated to dampen noise. That may result in much worse
cooling than ist standard today.

Arno

 

[Igor]

I have the GA-M61P-S3 and have installed it in two different ATX cases
without any mounting hole problem. I don't know why some of the
reviewers think the board is micro ATX. There is also one guy
complaining the board is rectangular.

The more I read online reviews, the less faith I put into them. With
some of them, you're left scratching your head wondering if the person
is even reviewing the right product. You also have to wonder if some
of these negative reviews couldn't be a part of astroturfing campaigns
being waged by rival manufacturers.

My primary complaint with this board is the BIOS does not enumerate
the hard disks correctly. <snip>

I'm not sure I understand what that means. Does the board have trouble
recognizing the size of the hard drives that are attached?

 

[Andy]

The more I read online reviews, the less faith I put into them. With
some of them, you're left scratching your head wondering if the person
is even reviewing the right product. You also have to wonder if some
of these negative reviews couldn't be a part of astroturfing campaigns
being waged by rival manufacturers.


I'm not sure I understand what that means. Does the board have trouble
recognizing the size of the hard drives that are attached?

A Bios that does not enumerate the hard disks correctly causes
problems like this:
<http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/msg/2482e94beb9f00ee?hl=en>.
What happened in this situation is:
1. the Bios is set to boot the second disk.
2. the Bios should tell Windows setup that the second disk is the boot
disk, i.e., the first enumerated disk.
3. instead the Bios tells Windows setup that the first disk is the
boot disk, causing Windows setup to store its boot files on that disk.
4. as long as the Windows CD is in the optical drive, Windows boots,
because the boot process is facilitated by the Windows CD, which sees
the first disk as the boot disk.
5. when the CD is removed, the Bios boots the second disk, but booting
fails because the boot files are on the other disk.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Andy.

Thanks for the clearest explanation of that process that I've heard.

I've often tried to explain how the System Partition winds up on the "wrong"
hard drive, but I'm just not techie enough ("enumerate" means something else
to us accountants) to spell it out the way you did.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta 2 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 beta v.275)

 

[Igor]

A Bios that does not enumerate the hard disks correctly causes
problems like this:
<http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/msg/2482e94beb9f00ee?hl=en>.
What happened in this situation is:
1. the Bios is set to boot the second disk.
2. the Bios should tell Windows setup that the second disk is the boot
disk, i.e., the first enumerated disk.
3. instead the Bios tells Windows setup that the first disk is the
boot disk, causing Windows setup to store its boot files on that disk.
4. as long as the Windows CD is in the optical drive, Windows boots,
because the boot process is facilitated by the Windows CD, which sees
the first disk as the boot disk.
5. when the CD is removed, the Bios boots the second disk, but booting
fails because the boot files are on the other disk.

Thanks. Like the other poster said, your explanation was very clear.

So when you have a motherboard with a BIOS that doesn't enumerate
properly, is your only recourse to boot from the first drive? What do
you do?

 

[Andy]

Thanks. Like the other poster said, your explanation was very clear.

So when you have a motherboard with a BIOS that doesn't enumerate
properly, is your only recourse to boot from the first drive? What do
you do?

You disconnect the first drive, using the bios to disable the port
it's connected to, if possible. Otherwise, physically disconnecting
the cable.

 

[Gary Avrett]

I too went with the Abit KN9 SLI motherboard along with a 6000+ Processor
socket AM2 , NVidia Geforce 7900GS, 320gb Seagate Sata Perpendicular
recording harddrive with 16mb ram, 2GB Corsair Memory 1.8volt, a 650 watt
Power supply, DVD

 

[Sudsy]

I'm starting to get tired of reading manuals. I may just get a plain

but predictable board that has the bare essentials. I've seen a few
from ECS and Biostar that would probably fit the bill.

I picked up an Asus M2A-VM HDMI which has an ATISB600 Southbridge and
integrated Radeon
X1250 graphics. With an AMD64X2 5600+ and twin 250GB SATA2 drives,
Oracle 10g under
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 positively screams! There were absolutely no
glitches with software
installation and everything was recognized properly. The only
difficulty arose when I went from
2GB to 4GB of DDR2 RAM. A BIOS upgrade was required to sort out the
problem but it would
have been nice to get a better response from technical support.
Overall, it's a very powerful and stable database server and I put it
together for around $500 by
reusing a case, DVD drive and power supply. BTW, 120mm fans are highly
recommended for
betting cooling and quieter operation.

Sudsy