Re: [OT] Asus A7M266 motherboard and Debian
On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Jeronimo Pellegrini wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 10:56:03PM -0400, Faheem Mitha wrote:
>
> [ Question about the Assu A7M266 ]
>
> > Does anyone have any comments on this? If you use this motherboard on
> > Debian without problems, particularly with a recent 2.4 kernel, I'd like
> > to hear about it. I plan to put Woody on it with 2.4.17. Complete
> > configuration follows.
>
> I bought it after a friend recommended it to me. I had no problems yet
> (using kernel 2.4.19-pre7 right now). My problems are only with the
> NVidia drivers (I should get a Matrox :-/ ), but the rest is OK.
> (BTW, I get AGP 4x here without problems)
Well, that is good to know. Thanks. I expect 2.4.19 might be out soon, and
if so I might try it.
> It seems to be a nice motherboard. Now, I wouldn't say it's good just
> because it's Asus. This time Asus did the right thing: a good AMD north
> bridge (because the VIA alternative would bring a bottleneck to the PCI
> bus, IIRC), and a reasonably good south bridge (the VIA686b, which had
> problems before, but not anymore, AFAIK).
> But I do remember some Asus motherboards that ewre really not worth
> their price... (some of the all-VIA boards, but I don't remember which
> ones)
Would you prefer these motherboards to the more recent ones from the point
of view of stability under Linux? I'm thinking for example of the Asus
A7V266 and the A7V333, I think the former has the KT266A chipset, and the
latter the KT333 chipset, both from VIA? My impression is that the more
recent Athlon motherhoards have more dodgy support in general (needing to
patch kernels etc,) which I don't want to get into.
> > (On a side note, I am a little confused about this chipset issue. Some
> > reviews refer to this board having the AMD 760 chipset on the northbridge,
> > and there are also references to a VIA chipset on the southbridge. I've no
> > idea what this terminology means.)
>
> North bridge AMD 761, south bridge VIA 686b. These are two chips you'll
> see on the board. As I understand, the north bridge controls the
> system -- it's CPU to PCI/AGP/memory bridge. The south bridge handles IO:
> UDMA, integrated USB, modem, audio, bridge to ISA (but you don't have
> ISA)
>
> If you look at the board, the north bridge is the one close to the CPU
> (yours will hava a heatsink), and the south bridge is closer to the
> other end of the board (you'll be able to see it's a "VIA VT82C686b")
Ok. I'm just wondering in that case why it is referred to as an AMD 761
chipset. Would it not be more accurate to call it a AMD761/VIA 686b
chipset? Is it just because the north bridge is more important? Thanks for
replying.
Faheem.
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