Re: Recommendations for 939 motherboard

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:20:00 +0000, Wes Gray wrote:

I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the choices for motherboards. I don't
even understand many of the options. I'd like to get a socket 939 mb
for an Athlon 64 with the following goals (in order of importance):

1. Reliable - this is for my main Linux server/desktop (on 24/7) so good
quality is priority 1, something like an Asus
2. Quiet - No fans would be very nice
3. Fast - what sort of FSB speed do I need?
4. Onboard networking and sound

Appreciate your recommendations. Thanks!

Do you already have a socket 939 CPU? If you already have the CPU then I'd
suggest the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum although any Nforce4 based motherboard
will do. I have an MSI K8N Neo4 with an Athlon64 X2 4400+ and 4G running
Fedora Core 5, it's been running 24/7 for about 18 months.

Yup, I have one of these and am pretty happy with it. It has built-in dual
Gb lan and sound (tho I prefer my add-in sound card), and all built-in
hardware works just fine with recent Linux kernels.

But actually one feature of that board that was very important for me, and
which just about all of the reviews and hype seem to ignore or think is
terribly passe, is that it has 4 PCI (not PCI-X) slots. For those of us
with add in sound, SCSI, TV tuner, and modem cards, it's getting mighty hard
to find a mobo that will take them all. Most new board have only 3 or even
just 2 PCI slots. AFAICT there are basically no add-in cards available yet
for PCI-X, except for video controllers. Not to mention that I already have
all of the PCI cards that I want... So to me, a board with 3 PCI slots and
3 PCI-X slots (often including 2 PCI-X slots for SLI, for which I have no
use) is just a lot of wasted space.

Some drawbacks of the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum:

* its name is too long
* if you put in 4 GB RAM, it only sees 3.5 GB; but you can overcome that by
setting the "hardware memory hole adjust" or some such in the BIOS
* if you put in 4 GB RAM, it slows down to 333 MHz. Not sure if that can be
overcome; I haven't spent the time on it yet.

A.

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