[NBLUG/talk] Considerations for a new motherboard?

[Walter Hansen]

I like the elitegroup motherboards. I have the KN-1 and the one after it
on two systems. On-board raid generally won't work with Linux, and may be
tough with even Windows. It seems to require a driver, which made me toss
it in favor of software or a different setup entirely. I did have a little
fun getting the gigabit up on the one, but it followed along eventually.
Not sure for the onboard sound as I never configured it on the server.

For IDE both the boards had the two or three ports and both had at least 4
SATAs. Also something like 12 USB ports although some seem to work better
than others for certain things.

I know that their boards come in AMD. The ones I have use 939 sockets. But
these two use the newer video interface PCI-Extreeme. They might have
other boards with interfaces.

I find their boards pretty and nice. And a very good bang/buck ratio.

Worth a look:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/index.aspx?MenuID=0&LanID=9


-- 
This would be real cute NSFW tagline, but I'm married and would get killed.

> 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.
>
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