[NBLUG/talk] Considerations for a new motherboard?

[Lincoln Peters]

At the moment, the USB failures on my motherboard seem to have disappeared, 
although I wouldn't be surprised if they return immediately after I send this 
e-mail, and the pattern suggests that they will return next January.  So it 
looks like I'll want to obtain a new motherboard before then, and I thought I 
should field a few questions.

My current motherboard is an ABIT with a VIA chipset.  It uses an AMD Athlon 
CPU at 2.167GHz, and has the following features:

* An AGP 4X/8X slot.
* Two PATA/133 (a.k.a. IDE) ports.
* A floppy controller.
* A sound controller (which jitters during any disk I/O).
* A 10/100BaseTX Ethernet controller (which occasionally drops packets)
* Four external USB 2.0 ports.
* Six PCI slots.
* Three DDR-SDRAM slots.

I have added the following expansion cards to it:
* An ATI Radeon 9200 video card (AGP).
* An nVidia RIVA TNT2 video card (PCI, for a secondary display).
* An Edimax gigabit Ethernet controller, with a RealTek chipset.
* A Sound Blaster Live!
* An IDE/133 card with two ports, with a Promise chipset.
* A SATA/150 card with two ports, with a Promise chipset.

I also have a rather fancy RAID-capable IDE card with 4 ports that I picked up 
at the Computer Recycling Center a few weeks ago (it even has a slot for 
RAM).  I verified that it works but I haven't yet done anything with it.


Obviously, if I replace this motherboard, I want to ensure that it does at 
least what the old motherboard did, although I don't need onboard sound or 
Ethernet if I can continue using my previous expansion cards.  But there are 
a few issues I wanted to ask about, specifically:

* Is a multi-core system worth it?  I'm thinking that it would be, since I 
tend to work on lots of different tasks simultaneously, but my only 
experience with multi-core systems thus far is my MacBook Pro (which isn't 
running Linux...yet).

* Is there an upper bound to how many cores are worthwhile on Linux?  I ask 
because I've heard that the Linux kernel has some locking issues when running 
on multiple processors that cause it to use them less efficiently than a BSD 
system (or Mac OS X) would.  But I'm not prepared to switch operating systems 
just to get a better multi-core kernel; I'm sure that the Linux kernel 
developers are working very hard on eliminating those locking issues.

* Is a 64-bit system worth it?  I certainly wouldn't mind being able to put 
more than 4GB of RAM in a computer if I could afford it (I'm frequently 
hitting the swap with nearly everything I try to do on the 1GB of RAM I have 
now), but I don't know if it would involve other hassles (e.g. I don't want 
to take extra time to compile my own packages if I don't have to).

* I have two IDE hard drives, two optical drives that also use IDE, and one 
SATA hard drive.  And it's not unlikely that I would add more drives later (my 
case has 6 internal 3.5" bays, 2 external 3.5" bays, and 5 external 5.25" 
bays).  Am I likely to find a motherboard with at least four IDE ports *and* 
a few SATA ports, or will I still need to use at least one add-on disk 
controller?

* Is onboard RAID worth it?  I'm currently using a rather exotic software RAID 
scheme in which the disks are partitioned so that two RAID arrays span three 
disks (and I can still lose one disk without losing data), not to mention 
that it involves two IDE disks and one SATA disk, and I'm not sure if a 
hardware RAID implementation exists that can accomplish the same thing 
without forcing me to buy at least one new hard drive.

* Is there a consumer-level motherboard out there where the onboard sound 
controller produces decent sound?  Every motherboard I've ever used that 
offered onboard sound would start to jitter when the system was under load, 
whereas a Sound Blaster Live! would not jitter at all (except perhaps when 
the system with under a VERY high load).

* Should I look for a motherboard with built-in gigabit Ethernet?  Or would I 
be better off with the add-on gigabit Ethernet card I have now?

* What about PCI Express and/or PCI-X?  Should I look for a motherboard that 
supports one or the other?  Of course, in any case I still want to be able to 
use my current PCI expansion cards.

* Any thoughts on performance per watt?

* Did I miss anything important?


-- 
Lincoln Peters		<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

Q:	What's the difference betweeen USL and the Graf Zeppelin?
A:	The Graf Zeppelin represented cutting edge technology for its time.