motherboard decision help

Randy Kelsoe randykel at swbell.net
Sun Mar 14 07:41:11 UTC 2004


fred smith wrote:

>One MB that has caught my eye is the Gigabyte GA-7VT600-L, a Via KT600
>chipset board. It also has integrated audio and LAN, using Realtec ALC-655
>audio chipset and Realtec 8101L 10/100 LAN chipset. I'd appreciate it if
>any of you know of how well this board and these chipsets are supported
>in a modern Linux if you'd let me know. This Gigabyte board can be
>purchased today for US$63 from newegg (not a plug, just a fact).
>  
>
This MB will work fine as long as you don't need accelerated 3D 
graphics. The AGP 8X port is not supported well with the 2.4 kernel, but 
does have support in the 2.6 kernels. I could not get direct rendering 
to work with a 2.4 kernel, but had success with the 2.6 kernel. So, if 
you want accelerated 3D, go with the 2.6 kernel.

>Alternatively, I'd also appreciate suggestions for similarly priced boards
>that are known to work well (I'd like to not go much over about $80). (I'm
>leaning away from an Nvidia chipset board merely because I don't want to
>depend on nvidia for closed-source drivers for the board, though I could
>perhaps be convinced otherwise!) One small caveat is I need two serial
>ports, and some new boards come with only one (I'm using both a serial modem
>and serial UPS).
>  
>
I am using the GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 MB, which uses the Nvidia nforce2 
chipset. I'm not using any of the Nvidia drivers. This mobo uses the 
RealTek 8169 onboard gigabit lan, and not the nforce2 lan. I tried using 
the Nvidia drivers for the onboard sound, and they had problems. 
Anaconda selected the intel8x0 driver for the onboard video, and that 
works much better than the Nvidia driver. This mobo has worked well with 
RH9 (but needed a later kernel), and has worked well with FC1 right out 
of the box. It's almost twice the price of the GA-7VT600-L, but it has 
SATA, RAID, and Dual Channel memory. I'm not using the RAID, but SATA 
works (though not at full speed yet), and dual channel memory is about 
50% faster than single channel mode. There is also a cheaper model that 
does not have the RAID and SATA, and has a 100base T NIC.





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