Re: Stable mainboard for Athlon/IDE

Re: Stable mainboard for Athlon/IDE

[John Bradford]

> Which chipset/mainboard should I buy if I need a stable Athlon-based
> server (with two IDE disks)?

I've got two KT400 based boards in use here, (Gigabyte GA-7VA), which
have always been reliable.  They support up to 3 GB of RAM, which is
more than some other chipsets do...

John.

Re: Stable mainboard for Athlon/IDE

[Florian Weimer]

John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com> writes:

>> Which chipset/mainboard should I buy if I need a stable Athlon-based
>> server (with two IDE disks)?
>
> I've got two KT400 based boards in use here, (Gigabyte GA-7VA), which
> have always been reliable.

Gigabyte GA-7VA is no longer available either, it seems. *sigh*

Stable mainboard for Athlon/IDE

[Florian Weimer]

Which chipset/mainboard should I buy if I need a stable Athlon-based
server (with two IDE disks)?

AMD 761 based boards (which were recommended to me) don't seem to be
available anymore, at least from our local suppliers.

Or should I ditch AMD and buy Intel instead?

Re: Stable mainboard for Athlon/IDE

[William Gallafent]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Florian Weimer wrote:

> AMD 761 based boards (which were recommended to me) don't seem to be
> available anymore, at least from our local suppliers.

Well, for dual-processor systems you can still get the AMD 760 chipsets,
because nobody else made a DP chipset for Athlon (that I know of!). I run
software-raid-0 over two ATA drives on a Tyan S2460 (tiger MP) which has the
AMD 760MP chipset. This works very well. There is a slightly more expensive
version, the S2466, which uses the 760MPX chipset. Both are still available,
as are boards from several other manufacturers using the same chipsets. The
onboard IDE on AMD760MP supports speeds up to ATA-100 and seems to be rock
solid under Linux.

I and others have had problems which may relate to interactions between AMD
760MP(X) chipset and Promise PCI ATA (e.g. Ultra133-TX2) controllers, with
machine lockups and data corruption when there is a heavy PCI load, so this
combination may be best avoided.

> Or should I ditch AMD and buy Intel instead?

Could do ... depends how deep your pockets are and what you will be using the
server for I suppose.

-- 
Bill Gallafent.