Re: Motherboards

[Philipp Lehman <lehman@gmx.net>]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Keith O'Connell <keith_oconnell@bigfoot.com> wrote:

>I want a new machine, and for fun and education I am going to build it
>>from scratch. I have pretty much decided on an Athlon 1.2GHz. I will run
>a small partition with Windows Me on it, but it will predominantly be up
>in Debian.
>
>I thought I would consult here as to the motherboard that will give the
>least compatibility problems with the various chip sets available and
>for on-board sound.

I can only comment on SDRAM based boards: all recent Athlon boards I'm
aware of are based on VIA's KT133A, they should all work. Recent 2.2.x
and 2.4.x kernels have support for the VIA 82C686 audio codec; I
haven't tried it myself but I've read many times that it works quite
well. The only thing that will probably not work is the
(pseudo-)hardware ATA RAID support present on the ATA RAID boards that
any manufacturer offers nowadays.

I've been running potato and now woody on an Epox EP-8KTA3 with an
Athlon 1000/133. It works like a charm, I highly recommend the Epox
board if you're planning to go with a SDRAM based solution. Avoid the
ATA RAID boards. They will work just fine, but I doubt you'll get
anywhere with the ATA-100/RAID controller. Wether cheapo ATA RAID is
worth the trouble anyway is quite a different question.

There's one caveat: the VIA 686b south bridge has a serious design
flaw in the way both IDE controllers interact. They communicate over
the PCI bus and heavy load on the PCI bus is known to corrupt data
when copying from the second to the first controller. VIA claims this
only happens with a SBLive! card (which put severe load on the PCI
bus), but there are reports from people observing this problem without
one. If possible, don't connect any hard drives to the second IDE
controller. And make sure you flash the latest BIOS ASAP!

HTH

-- 
Philipp Lehman <lehman@gmx.net>