On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 05:29:23AM +0000, Syd Hancock wrote:
On Monday 12 Jan 2004 10:25 pm, MJ Ray wrote:
On 2004-01-12 21:57:19 +0000 Ben Norcutt ben@plextech.co.uk
wrote:
What are you recommendations on rock solid motherboard/cpu combos for linux? Thinking for server type setups onboard everything is ok as long as it's supported.
Avoid PC-Chips.
That's interesting - can you give more details? They do some very cheap boards that do get good reviews (but maybe the fact that they are so cheap is the problem?)
I think the "Avoid PC-Chips" dates from a year or two ago when one particular PC-Chips motherboard claimed an exaggerated clock speed and was notoriously flakey if you tried to run it at the quoted speed. It became a bit of a 'cause celebre'.
I believe current PC_Chips motherboards are OK. I saw one recent review that referred to the earlier problems and said essentially, "this one is OK though".
I have to admit that I have avoided PC_Chips motherboards since then though, there are lots of alternatives whose prices are low enough. The cost of the motherboard isn't usually a huge proportion of the system cost so saving a fiver or so probably isn't worth it.
I've bought Asus and, just recently, an Epox motherboard and have had no problems.
Gigabyte seem OK.
FWIW, the technician at my current school (who seems to know what he is doing) uses Gigabyte for the boxes he rebuilds there, on cost/reliability grounds.
I put a Tyan in a recent server and that works well, but you have to forage for drivers for some of it. Most of my kit is probably too old to be relevant now, anyway. How quickly things change...
Are/were there some issues with certain VIA chipsets and linuxfairly recently? More info/advice on that would be useful if anyone has some.
There certainly were issues with VIA chipsets and USB, I had that problem on a non-Linux system. It still occasionally fails to boot (WIn2k BSOD) but once booted is stable.