I've got an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard at home - bought it 13 months ago. Running Suse 10.0. Everything works okay except the sound in Quake4 - since it is also dual boot I haven't spent any time trying to figure out why. It does take a rather long time to boot up but I don't know if that's the motherboard or just Suse 10.0. (My primary machine is a laptop running Suse 9.3). I can also echo the sentiments of the Tyan server boards - we've got 16 dual Opteron nodes and only 1 node has locked up in the last 9 months. Of course these are server boards and don't have the same chipset as the desktop boards. Indeed Tyan only makes 1 939 board and it's listed as "new". Joe Jonathan Brooks wrote:

I Xposted on suse-linux-e, and consensus seemed to place Tyan somewhere near the top, and Asus rock bottom. That's a shame about Asus since they are nice boards to work with :( Anyone else got a view on this?

I'm particularly interested people's experience here, since it's an AMD64 machine that I'm trying to build.

Cheers, Jon

...

Hi,

I wonder if anyone has any experience with MSI motherboards? In particular, the MSI K8N SLI-FI for AMD64 chips (nforce4, socket 939).

What pecking order do you put for motherboard manufacturers?

Asus Abit Gigabyte Epox MSI ECS Foxconn ?????????

Cheers, Jon.

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 12.43, Jonathan Brooks wrote:

...

I Xposted on suse-linux-e, and consensus seemed to place Tyan somewhere near the top, and Asus rock bottom. That's a shame about Asus since they are nice boards to work with :( Anyone else got a view on this?

I'm particularly interested people's experience here, since it's an AMD64 machine that I'm trying to build.

I've recently bought an ABIT KN8 motherboard based on the NVidia chipset. Everything works fine except for the Gigabit Ethernet which works when it feels like it. As a work around I've just put in a PCI 10/100 card and that is fine. My Nvidia PCIe video card works well and so does the on-board Nvidia sound chip. I would probably give Abit 8 out of 10, my previous Abit board (Socket 754) is still working a treat. In 18 months Ive never had a crash

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 16:13, Thierry de Coulon wrote: that I could blame on the motherboard. Other than for the Gigabit problem the new board is very stable too. -- David Bottrill david@bottrill.org www.bottrill.org Registered Linux user number 330730 Internet Free World Dialup: 683864

Hi! Thanks for all the feedback - it's only going to be a regular PC, not a server/workstation so I think I'll go with my initial thought which was to go with Asus (A8N-SLI Deluxe). I may end up running Linux through VMware anyway, so the hardware is sort of irrelevant.... Best wishes, Jon. Mike Marion wrote:

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 11:43:34AM +0000, Jonathan Brooks wrote:

...

I Xposted on suse-linux-e, and consensus seemed to place Tyan somewhere near the top, and Asus rock bottom. That's a shame about Asus since they are nice boards to work with :( Anyone else got a view on this?

Running an Asus A8N-SLI Delux that's working like a charm. Running Gentoo though.

I tend to take most motherboard talks with a grain of salt.. too many people's opinions are based on one bad experience. I've had nothing but good experiences with Asus mobo's (a video card a few years ago is another story).

I've got experience with opterons now on Asus, Tyan, HDAMA (rev F and G), VIA (I think It's VIA), HP's own, etc.. they're all about the same really.

My experience in motherboards is that I've only had one actually fail on me.. and it was a Tyan. Of course I tend to upgrade my personal computers too often to see failures (other then hdd, fdd or CD drives). At work.. I'd say it's pretty even across the brands.

-- 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 Fri, 2006-03-24 at 12:51 -0800, pierre wrote:

I have never ever ever been able to talk to a technical human at ASUS. I don't think there are any :-)

I personally own and operate three ASUS motherboards but will never consider them again because of their disinterest in Linux. Not to mention their disinterest in their clients. I logged several support requests on their website (which isn't even up all the time, and didn't work properly in FF), and I didn't even get a "we received your mail and printed it out and are now wiping our butts with it" auto-response mail back. Nothing.

Gigabyte has patiently answered all the (sometimes very basic and/or stupid) questions I sent them - technical, pre-sales and feature/product requests. Every single one. They'll get my money as long as they keep going like that. Hans

I Xposted on suse-linux-e, and consensus seemed to place Tyan somewhere near the top, and Asus rock bottom. That's a shame about Asus since they are nice boards to work with :( Anyone else got a view on this? Vastly overpriced and poor quality control. They make excellent boards if you get a nice sample. But it's not a guarantee. I have replaced too many ASUS boards to still be able to give it the benifit of the doubt. Made the mistake on my home PC to get an ASUS board. Had nothing but trouble. Had it swopped out, had nothing but trouble with

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 11:43 +0000, Jonathan Brooks wrote: the replacement. Trashed it, bought a Gigabyte of half the price, better features, and it just works, and even performs better. In the last year I have thrown away one Gigabyte and one MSI board - both got hit by lightning multiple times before giving in. Just my 2 cents.... Hans

Þann Miðvikudaguren den 22 mars 2006 18:59 skrifaði einar_linux:

Hello,

my wife uses an MSI K8N Neo2 (amd64), I sit in front of an MSI K8T Master2 FAR (opteron) and in the cellar the MSI K8T Master1 FAR (opteron) is peacefully doing its job as a server. The opteron machines run linux and windows. My wife is an exchange admin and therefore uses windows only. All machines work fine.

In the past, I had several times minor issues with ASUS boards: a floppy controller died (confirmed by a local ASUS reseller), the onboard sound died. I started years ago with ASUS boards but nowadays I would avoid them. If I would rebuilt an opteron workstation today I would go for Tyan. If it is "just" a PC, I think MSI is not a bad choice.

regards,

einar

An Einar, in Switzerland?

Jonathan Brooks wrote:

...

Hi,

I wonder if anyone has any experience with MSI motherboards? In particular, the MSI K8N SLI-FI for AMD64 chips (nforce4, socket 939).

What pecking order do you put for motherboard manufacturers?

Asus Abit Gigabyte Epox MSI ECS Foxconn ?????????

Cheers, Jon.