Wow - ASUS bottom of the list for everyone. That's a shame since they win so many awards for the quality of components etc. How much of a problem can Asus' lack of support be? I guess that most Nforce4 boards are pretty much like any other Nforce4 board? Is it a lack of information from Asus, or people just deciding that Asus' attitude sucks, that stop Asus boards being any good for running Linux? After all, how much support do people actually get from the other motherboard manufacturers? I don't know the answer to this. I had a closer look at the MSI SLI-FI motherboard, and initially I thought it looked a really good deal (www.savastore.com has them for £60 plus VAT). However, closer inspection reveals that when running in SLI mode, the bandwidth of the PCI-E bus appears to be shared between the 2 channels (i.e. both cards run at x8). Am I right in thinking that "normal" SLI boards have dedicated x16 channels for each card, not sharing them when in SLI mode? Okay, okay, so I guess I'm never going to get close to the petabytes/sec theoretical limit of the PCI-E bus, but you never know ;) Thanks for people's suggestions. Regards, Jon. Felix Miata wrote:

On 06/03/21 10:59 Jonathan Brooks apparently typed:

...

What pecking order do you put for motherboard manufacturers?

Intel Tyan Gigabyte Abit

MSI FIC Epox Supermicro AOpen Biostar DFI

Chaintech Jetway Foxconn - isn't this another ECS brand? PCChips - another ECS brand ECS - lousy support, and not much better products Asus - no support if they find out you don't use M$ OS

-- Jonathan Brooks (Ph.D.) Research Fellow PaIN Group, Department of Human Anatomy & Genetics University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QX tel: 01865 282654 fax: 01865 282656

On Monday 27 March 2006 7:17 pm, Michael W Cocke wrote:

I truly don't understand why everyone whines about Asus main boards so much - I haven't used anything but Asus boards in years snip just keeps working, much to the annoyance of everyone who says Asus boards are crap.

I agree, that's all I've used for years and I have always been totally satisfied. I understand (according to what I read) that Asus has an anti-Linux attitude, and some people might avoid them for that reason, especially in an enterprise setting where one might want to be assured of tech support. However, as a home user I never had any reason to call for tech support, and I am talking about numerous Linux-only systems, so even though I am very disappointed with Asus' attitude towards Linux (and have sent emails telling them so), I can build my Linux systems with Asus boards with confidence that they will work completely trouble-free. In my case no Asus board I have ever used ever needed any tweaking whatsoever to run Linux. I also have never had any kind of failure whatsoever with an Asus motherboard. Bryan **************************************** Powered by Mepis Linux 3.3.1 KDE 3.3.2 KMail 1.7.2 This is a Microsoft-free computer Bryan S. Tyson bryantyson@earthlink.net ****************************************

On Tuesday 28 March 2006 16:51, Hans du Plooy wrote:

1. It's not that ASUS boards are crap.  It's that their quality control is poor.  For every dud ASUS board I've encountered, I've seen too few boards that work perfectly.  The success rate (if I may call it that) is higher with other (cheaper) brands.

When I had my problem of 4 Asus boards in a row going bad, I did some googling and came across a report that said that when ASUS gets a board returned, they will ship it back out to someone else without even testing it. Doesn't seem possible, but I could believe it.

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:51:51 +0200, you wrote:

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 22:53 -0500, Bryan S. Tyson wrote:

...

On Monday 27 March 2006 7:17 pm, Michael W Cocke wrote:

...

I truly don't understand why everyone whines about Asus main boards so much - I haven't used anything but Asus boards in years snip just keeps working, much to the annoyance of everyone who says Asus boards are crap.

I agree, that's all I've used for years and I have always been totally satisfied.

Well, two things:

1. It's not that ASUS boards are crap. It's that their quality control is poor. For every dud ASUS board I've encountered, I've seen too few boards that work perfectly. The success rate (if I may call it that) is higher with other (cheaper) brands.

So I don't think their boards are crap. I just know that if I supply an ASUS board to a client, the chances of having to go back there to replace it (which means I make a loss on the board because of extra travel and unbillable time expended) is just higher than with some other brands.

The other problem with ASUS is their blatant disregard for their customers, and not just their Linux using customers. I had an ASUS A8V880 board which had a bios bug that caused the machine to hang if you start a graphical interface (both in Linux and Windows) if you use the optimal settings. To get it to function, I had to set the FSB to 200mhz (my CPU is has a 266, thus I had to underclock the CPU), and set the memory down to at least 266mhz (it's DDR400) and disable dual channel mode. Some googling showed me just about everybody else with this particular board had the same (or similar) problems. Everybody has written and complained to ASUS, but more than a year after the board hit the market, there was still no BIOS update available to fix the problem.

2. If you've only ever used ASUS, I don't expect you to understand why we say ASUS is not all that. No disrespect meant.

No offense taken, and I have used other boards - with much worse results. I've not had a bad Asus board out of around a hundred (my own equipment and clients). Maybe they ship different boards to the US? I've never seen or heard of a A8V880 without looking at their web site. Mike- -- If you're not confused, you're not trying hard enough. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments,

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 19:17 -0500, Michael W Cocke wrote:

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:17:24 +0000, you wrote:

...

Wow - ASUS bottom of the list for everyone. That's a shame since they win so many awards for the quality of components etc.

I truly don't understand why everyone whines about Asus main boards so much - I haven't used anything but Asus boards in years - I have over a dozen of them at home running various versions of SuSE currently, previously Redhat, Gentoo, and Mandrake. All the on board peripherals work well with very minimum fiddling - usually none. Several of the systems are configured very oddly - 2 PCI IDE controllers in addition to the onboards, for example - all fully loaded. Whoever said rsync was good for a backup doesn't know from 5.6 Tb per server. Everything just keeps working, much to the annoyance of everyone who says Asus boards are crap.

Use what main board you're happy with.

They're not complaining so much about the boards being crap as much as when you get a bad board and request support and you're running linux they no longer want to talk to you, period. So it's not that the boards are crap ASUS support is crap if you're running linux. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

On Monday 27 March 2006 23:08, Ken Schneider wrote:

They're not complaining so much about the boards being crap as much as when you get a bad board and request support and you're running linux they no longer want to talk to you, period. So it's not that the boards are crap ASUS support is crap if you're running linux.

Not necessarily so.... I went through *four* Asus boards one time and each one 'smoked' the minute I turned it on. I fortunately was dealing with a vendor that I had done business with for a long time so they tolerated the problems... and I finally sent the 4th board back and told them to build me a computer around an Intel board. Will never buy another ASUS board although I had good luck with them prior to that fiasco.

On 28/03/06, Daniel Bauer wrote: My P4PE seems to

be computer stone age anyway (3 yrs old) :-)

Daniel

--

:-))) you'd be surprised.... I still use boards at least twice this age. -- ============================================== I am only human, please forgive me if I make a mistake it is not deliberate. ============================================== Xmas may be over but, PLEASE DON'T drink and drive you'll make it to the next one that way. Kevan Farmer Linux user #373362 Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:40:57 +0200, you wrote:

Am Dienstag, 28. März 2006 02:17 schrieb Michael W Cocke:

...

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:17:24 +0000, you wrote:

...

Wow - ASUS bottom of the list for everyone. That's a shame since they win so many awards for the quality of components etc.

I truly don't understand why everyone whines about Asus main boards so much - I haven't used anything but Asus boards in years - I have over a dozen of them at home running various versions of SuSE currently, previously Redhat, Gentoo, and Mandrake. All the on board peripherals work well with very minimum fiddling - usually none. Several of the systems are configured very oddly - 2 PCI IDE controllers in addition to the onboards, for example - all fully loaded. Whoever said rsync was good for a backup doesn't know from 5.6 Tb per server. Everything just keeps working, much to the annoyance of everyone who says Asus boards are crap.

Use what main board you're happy with.

Mike-

My Asus P4PE mainboard works perfect, too, except that the onboard ethernet controller must be desabled in the BIOS, because, if enabled, Suse 10.0 completely locks up in an early stage of booting. It took quite a while to find out about this, nobody in any forum has ever seen it, finally the people from the opensuse mailing list could find the reason and help.

Don't know if this arises with other Asus main boards, too. My P4PE seems to be computer stone age anyway (3 yrs old) :-)

I have a pair of P4P800's with the Marvell miniport onboard that work fine with SuSE 9.0 and 9.3. Both of those boards also have an Intel 1000/TM slotted (that's a backchannel crossover directly between the servers - used solely for rsync and cp between servers - the Intels are expensive but MUCH faster than the Marvells - The Marvells are what the users see over the switches). As you can probably tell, I have an unusual home network. 8-)> Mike- -- If you're not confused, you're not trying hard enough. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments,