[conspire] A nice P4 motherboard chipset for Linux

[Rick Moen]

The Intel i865 is a nice, modern yet quite well tested P4 / Socket478
motherboard chipset capable of supporting an 800 MHz front-side (memory)
bus and a 2.4 GHz CPU.

Among the OEMs that build motherboards from it is Abit, whose IS7-G
"Springdale" ATX motherboard I'd like to call to everyone's attention.
Without CPU, it costs about $110, street price.  Here's another good
sign:  It's a less-expensive follow-on to the i875 "Canterwood" chipset
released to tapp the high end of the market, but has pretty much
indistinguishable performance.

The thing has "dual-channel" DDR266/333/400 unbuffered SDRAM support,
meaning that the DIMMs are divided into two banks, each with its own
path to the CPU.  It does Serial ATA RAID natively, so you can
experiment with that.  And it has some sort of 3Com 3C2000-family GigE
ethernet, 8 USB ports, and 3 Firewire ports built in, among other
things.  5 PCI slots, no ISA.  Sound chipset is RealTek ALC650
(six-channel) with the inevitable AC97 codec support.  Integrated crummy
video (Intel "Extreme Graphics 2" can be ignored.  4 184-pin DIMM
sockets.  AGP socket supports 1.5V or 0.8V cards only, not 3.3V cards.

Put some Mushkin or Crucial RAM on it, put in a 2.4 GHz P4 (maybe $250
for one that will do 800 MHz FSB, if they're out yet at all, or save $75
and run the memory bus slower), add a Radeon 9700 Pro AGPx4 card, put it
all in a _huge_ tower case with PC Power & Cooling power supply, add the
disk array of your preference, and I'd say you have a future-proofed
high-end Linux system.  (Note that the memory architecture impresses me
much more than does the CPU support.)

Much as I like AMD's CPUs, I'll be this one would run a good bit cooler,
too.  And Abit has an excellent quality record.

Hmm, see also interesting news about upgrade potential at
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/20030606.html .  (Look for "Abit
Cracks the 865PE PAT Code".)

And it's overclocker friendly: 
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/20030523_050205.html

-- 
Cheers,                            Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est.
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com