On Mon July 28 2003 4:13 pm, you wrote:
On Mon July 28 2003 2:22 pm, H du Plooy wrote:
On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 22:26, Richard wrote:
Does anyone have any opinions (really opening up here) between the MSI K7N2Delta ILSR motherboard and the Gigabyte 7N400 Pro? Both seem to be good
Let us know what you got and how it works. I'm interested in ditching my old SD-RAM board for a DDR setup so my Athlon can perform the way it should. I've seen the benchmarks and the nForce boards rock, but I'm sceptical of nVidia under linux (after two years of frequent unneccessary trouble with various nVidia cards.
Thanks Hans
I got the Gigabyte board and my review would be mixed at this point. <snip> On the tremendously negative side I have not been able to use the dual-channel DDR memory capability. I have two memory sticks, which test out fine alone and together, so long as they are in same channel. When placed into different channels (a requirement for dual-channel) they system shows multiple errors and locks up, though at different places for both WinXP and SuSE 8.2. I don't think it is an OS problem. <snip>. I cannot say at this point whether the problem is hardware or BIOS or somehow software based.
Summary: board works and seems stable (except for the dual-channel memory issue, above) but SuSE'ers will have to do some legwork and building of their own for drivers. I suspect the raid function should be considered non-supported and not available to SuSE'ers at this point (kernel issue).
Hope this helps. I am nothing if not wordy. So my son says. Richard
A followup to my own post, as I want to be fair to Gigabyte: dual-channel problem seems to be hardware based, specifically, the memory chips. I was using Corsair XMS sticks. Giga. tech support today said they are getting reports of varying results with Corsair memory, no idea why (varying to me means "failure" since I do not want to work with varying hardware). Wonderful memory geek at local Fry's tested board with similar but matched Corsair memory, got failures and errors similar to mine, but none with Kingston sticks or another brand he tried that I do not recall. He also indicated he was getting some other customer complaints similar to mine. Presumably these other customers are by and large Window$ users so it is not just "linux". (I get real tired of hearing that.) We assume the problem then is incompatibility of memory, not the MB, and also not OS related. I am also questioning the stability of the Nvidia ethernet driver, nvnet.o, derived from the Nvidia website. I am getting lockups with my cable modem that require shutdown, unplug cable modem and router, wait, re-boot and start all and re-install network card thru Yast, and not always with great success. When I install my old Netgear card and setup with Yast and the tulip driver, all is fine, no lockups yet. An earlier post suggested there was a new driver on the Nvidia website but I have not found/seen it yet. Richard