A7N8X-E Deluxe experiences? or other motherboard recommendations?

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

List,

I've decided that I'm going to upgrade my home server from RH 9 to FC 1 
sometime before April.  I figure that that may be a good time to also 
upgrade from my 866MHz Pentium III as well. :)

I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS 
A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board. 
(http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09)  I've seen 
some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was 
curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had 
with this mother board.

If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be 
interested in that as well.  Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard 
and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US.  I'm only interested 
in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with 
cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.

The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that 
doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me.  I don't really care too 
much about AGP8x or  anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game 
machine.

Thanks!

Ben

[Tom Gibbs]

Benjamin,
I only had trouble with the nforce2 chipset (different MB) with RH9 and
FC1 not having my network interface working until I stumbled in the
following site:
http://www.iskream.com/doc/nvidia_nforce2_drivers_rh9_en.html
After following the simple instructions everything now works as it
should. No other problems.

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 20:39, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> I've seen some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was 
> curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had 
> with this mother board.

[Randy Kelsoe]

Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS 
> A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board. 
> (http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09)  I've seen 
> some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was 
> curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had 
> with this mother board.
>
> If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be 
> interested in that as well.  Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard 
> and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US.  I'm only interested 
> in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with 
> cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.

I'm using a GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 mb, and it's working very well. FC1 
detected everything on install. I installed the nforce2 drivers from 
Nvidia, but did not really need to do that. This motherboard uses a 
RealTek lan chip, so the nvidia lan driver is not needed. FC1 detected 
my soundchip as an i810_audio, which worked fine. When I installed the 
nvidia audio driver, XMMS works fine, but other apps (flashplayer, 
bzflag) sound weird like the frequency has been shifted up 2 octaves, 
and there is also distortion and clipping.

ECS worked fine for me with linux.....Windows is another story....and 
ECS support is a royal pain.....
> The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that 
> doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me.  I don't really care too 
> much about AGP8x or  anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game 
> machine.

You will not see a speed increase by using DDR400 with a 333MHz FSB 
Athlon CPU. It may even be slower than DDR333 (PC2700). Using 
'dual-channel' memory will definitely be faster (almost 50% faster in my 
case).

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Randy Kelsoe" 
To: 
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 10:57 AM
Subject: Re: A7N8X-E Deluxe experiences? or other motherboard
recommendations?
> Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> > I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS
> > A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board.

<snip>
> I'm using a GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 mb, and it's working very well. FC1
> detected everything on install. I installed the nforce2 drivers from
> Nvidia, but did not really need to do that. This motherboard uses a
> RealTek lan chip, so the nvidia lan driver is not needed. FC1 detected
> my soundchip as an i810_audio, which worked fine. When I installed the
> nvidia audio driver, XMMS works fine, but other apps (flashplayer,
> bzflag) sound weird like the frequency has been shifted up 2 octaves,
> and there is also distortion and clipping.

I just saw a review on Tom's Hardware about this motherboard, and it rated
higher than the ASUS.  I may look into it instead.

<snip>
> You will not see a speed increase by using DDR400 with a 333MHz FSB
> Athlon CPU. It may even be slower than DDR333 (PC2700). Using
> 'dual-channel' memory will definitely be faster (almost 50% faster in my
> case).

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out why the AMD Athlon XP CPU's are 333FSB,
yet the motherboards are 400FSB?  I just saw something about the current
Barton CPU's are 333, but that 400's are due out soon?  I'll probably have
to buy my stuff in installments, so maybe I could buy the RAM this month,
the motherboard next month, and then by the time I'm ready for the CPU, the
400's will be out? :)  I *definitely want to do the dual-channel memory
thing, though.

Thanks for the input!  I don't have the money to play spray and pray, so I
appreciate the experience sharing.

Ben

[Randy Kelsoe]

Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> Yeah, I've been trying to figure out why the AMD Athlon XP CPU's are 333FSB,
> yet the motherboards are 400FSB?  I just saw something about the current
> Barton CPU's are 333, but that 400's are due out soon?  I'll probably have
> to buy my stuff in installments, so maybe I could buy the RAM this month,
> the motherboard next month, and then by the time I'm ready for the CPU, the
> 400's will be out? :)  I *definitely want to do the dual-channel memory
> thing, though.

The mobo is capable of using the 400FSB, or 333, 266, or 200. The Athlon 
3000 and 3200 come in 400FSB models, but they are expensive (~$400-$500).

If you don't need the GigaBit lan, SATA, and RAID, you could go with the 
GA-7N400 (no nic), or the GA-7N400-L (with onboard lan) for less money.

[Andre Costa]

Hi Benjamin,

I have the exact same mobo you mention (A7N8X-Deluxe). Onlye issues I
had with both Fedora and RH9 were:

- onboard nForce NIC: cannot be recognized without nVidia drivers; works
  like a charm with them
- sound: nvaudio driver (from nVdia, based on intel8x0) works reasonably
  well (Flash plugin doesn't work very well with it). Using now ALSA
  intel8x0 driver, seems to work better (at least Flash plays nice with
  it)
- PS/2 console mouse stopped playing nice with X mouse with FC1.
  Requires me to turn off console mouse before starting X (used to work
  flawlessly on RH9)

Aside from these, I hadn't had any trouble with the mobo, which performs
really nice IMHO.

HTH

Andre

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 22:39:50 -0600 (CST)
"Benjamin J. Weiss"  wrote:
> List,
>
> I've decided that I'm going to upgrade my home server from RH 9 to FC
> 1 sometime before April.  I figure that that may be a good time to
> also upgrade from my 866MHz Pentium III as well. :)
>
> I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an
> ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board. 
> (http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09)  I've
> seen some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so
> I was curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might
> have had with this mother board.
>
> If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo,
> I'd be interested in that as well.  Basically, I'm trying to get a
> fast motherboard and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US. 
> I'm only interested in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had
> bad experiences with cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the
> experience.
>
> The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that 
> doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me.  I don't really care too
>
> much about AGP8x or  anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop
> game machine.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ben
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Paul Penrod]

I have a desktop running an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe with the Nforce 2. Here is my
experience with a slightly older motherboard than the one you are considering:

Under RH9, I had NO SATA support for the SIL3112A prior to kernel 2.4.22.
Under Fedora, it found it just fine and I have a pair of Maxtor 250GB SATA 
drives
running in software RAID 0 configuration for speed. Currently, hdparm reports
about 54 MB/sec for the array, which is quite tolerable. Through the cache
testing I'm showing about 1600 MB/sec for the small stuff. The 8MB cache
on the drives skew the testing but make for some nice numbers... :-)

I did not have a problem booting the system under either the 2115 or 2129 
kernels.

If you want NTFS support (read only) then you need to get the compiled drivers
from NTFS.org, as RedHat still does not provide anything to make this work.
Wish they would as I still have media with NTFS partitions I have to keep for a
client and some of the video work I do 'cause Pinnacle cant figure out how to
move their software onto a *real* operating system.

I did have a bit of a bugger with the dual LAN hardware, but Fedora does 
find at least
one of the two LAN ports without any configuration. I suspect with the 
newer Nforce2
chipset you will have fewer problems on that end.

I like the ATI 8500 based card in the system. Xfree86 finds it and it runs 
fast.

I'm running with 1.5GB or DDR 333 memory and it works without a hitch. I 
can use fast
CAS timings and get some good performance out of it.

Hope that helps,

...Paul

At 09:39 PM 12/17/2003, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> List,
>
> I've decided that I'm going to upgrade my home server from RH 9 to FC 1
> sometime before April.  I figure that that may be a good time to also
> upgrade from my 866MHz Pentium III as well. :)
>
> I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS
> A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board.
> (http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09)  I've seen
> some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was
> curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had
> with this mother board.
>
> If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be
> interested in that as well.  Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard
> and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US.  I'm only interested
> in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with
> cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.
>
> The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that
> doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me.  I don't really care too
> much about AGP8x or  anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game
> machine.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ben
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

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