Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

[Johannes Grødem]

There was a question about this mainboard a while ago, but I can't
remember seeing if his problem was resolved, so I'm wondering if
anyone here are using this board and if it works well in Linux.

-- 
johs

Re: Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 2002-08-11 at 20:28, Johannes Grødem wrote:
> There was a question about this mainboard a while ago, but I can't
> remember seeing if his problem was resolved, so I'm wondering if
> anyone here are using this board and if it works well in Linux.

Yes on the whole. BIOS version matters and there are problems sometimes
with broadcomm nics and some other boards. They suck power too so you
need a big case 430W+ PSU and plenty of fans. The dual Athlons are
pretty decent but they've lost the edge (from my current benchmarks) to
Intel on speed with the 2.4GHz PIV. They are also way worse on power
(with the as yet not fully debugged power management module that works
on some Athlons but not all it saves about 120-150W when idling. The
dual PIV system I benched will run in that power difference..

Re: Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

[Johannes Grødem]

* Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:

> Yes on the whole. BIOS version matters and there are problems sometimes
> with broadcomm nics and some other boards.

We thought we'd go with some Intel NICs.  (i82550-based, IIRC.)

> They suck power too so you need a big case 430W+ PSU and plenty of
> fans.

Hm.  They've only got 340W.  I'm thinking of getting this Asus-board
instead of some MSI-board (K7D Master-L) which seem to be broken, but
could the malfunctions (Tekram SCSI-controllers not working,
filesystem corruption, segfaults at weird places) be caused by too
little power?  Or would it just simply not work with too little power?
The cooling should be sufficient, though.

> The dual Athlons are pretty decent but they've lost the edge (from
> my current benchmarks) to Intel on speed with the 2.4GHz PIV.

It isn't that critical that they're fast so long as they're
reliable/stable.  If PIV is more reliable, maybe we should go for
those.  Do you have any motherboard-recommendations?  (I'm having a
hard time finding good hardware-advice when it comes to stability,
people seem to test mostly for performance.)

Thanks a lot for the response, by the way.

-- 
Johannes Grødem

Re: Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 2002-08-11 at 22:38, Johannes Grødem wrote:
> Hm.  They've only got 340W.  I'm thinking of getting this Asus-board
> instead of some MSI-board (K7D Master-L) which seem to be broken, but

According to the board docs I have - 400W PSU is required for dual CPU
usage. With the disk array I have I needed a 550W

> > The dual Athlons are pretty decent but they've lost the edge (from
> > my current benchmarks) to Intel on speed with the 2.4GHz PIV.
> 
> It isn't that critical that they're fast so long as they're
> reliable/stable.  If PIV is more reliable, maybe we should go for
> those.  Do you have any motherboard-recommendations?  (I'm having a
> hard time finding good hardware-advice when it comes to stability,
> people seem to test mostly for performance.)

The PIV board I am playing with I've only been playing with for 2 weeks.
Thats too soon to form a view on reliability IMHO

Re: Asus A7M266-D mainboard.

[Christian HOFFMANN]

> There was a question about this mainboard a while ago, but I can't
> remember seeing if his problem was resolved, so I'm wondering if
> anyone here are using this board and if it works well in Linux.
> 
I'm using a Asus A7M266D (the first revision without the USB port on 
the motherboard). It works well after the usual MP 1.4 problem (use 
1.1). I don't have the latest bios, i've flashed my bios only once after 
purchase.
I'm dual booting between W2K and Gentoo Linux with kernel 2.4.18 
XFS.

My PC:
- ANTEC 1040SX with an ANTEC 400 W power supply (3 additional 
fan in the front and 2 in the back)
- Dual MP 1900 with Volcano 6 Cu Cooler
- Asus Geforce 3 deluxe
- Abit HotRot PCI Raid controller with 4 WD 80Gb hard drive in raid 
0+1 for W2k
- 2 IBM 45 Gb hard drive for Linux
- DVDROM
- CDRW writer
- all PCI slot used

The temperature inside the case is 2°C above ambient and the CPU 
temperature is stable around 55°C and the PC is stable (even when 
compiling Gentoo Linux for hours, it's a meta-distribution and 
everything is compiled during the installation).

Just some information.-----------------------------------------------
Christian HOFFMANN <christian.hoffmann@noos.fr>