[lug] good amd motherboards for linux RH 71.

[Calvin Dodge]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 09:26:40AM -0800, lana emodsey wrote:
> hi,
> i am looking for first-hand references about
> reliable, "works off the box", AMD duron or better
> motherboards to run under RH 7.1

Are you interested in a _slightly_ negative data point?

We're running an ECS K7S5A with a Duron 800 and 512 megs of RAM.

It works pretty well - WITH the following caveats:

Sound and onboard NIC do not work yet under Linux (I assume that will be fixed in the future)

The disk drive I/O is pretty good (32 megs/second with hdparm -t) IF using the latest kernels (>=2.4.9).

With earlier kernels (2.4.7) hdparm reported about 13 megs/second, so you'd probably see that with the kernel which comes with RH 7.1

Don't get me wrong - this system works nicely as a server (we _did_ have to add a NIC, of course), but the onboard sound and NIC are (currently) of no value (and there's no onboard video). But the price is low enough, and the performance high enough, that I'd buy another one if I didn't need over 1 gig of RAM.

> i am considering both non-DDR and DDR options.  I
> understand the Duron cannot take advantage of DDR,
> but i am a bit fuzzy on that.  So, some education
> in that regard will be welcome.

I _think_ the issue is that the Duron can run DDR at 200 Mhz, while an Athlon can do 266 MHz (hardware esoterica is not my strong point).

The K7S5A has DDR and SDRAM slots (two of each).  Only one type (DDR _or_ SDRAM) can be used, so the total RAM limit is 1 gigabyte.

> i am open to recommendations/comments on boards 
> with on-board support for net/video/sound.

We also have an Epox KL-133M which spends the bulk of its time in the Dark Side (Windows). Linux runs on it, but I haven't yet gotten XFree86 to work with the onboard video (the computer locks up as soon as I start X). The hard drive performance rate is much lower, and I can't really recommend the Epox for serious server use.

I'm curious - are you putting together a server, or a workstation?
 
Calvin
-- 
Calvin Dodge
Certified Linux Bigot (tm)
http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net