[conspire] A nice P4 motherboard chipset for Linux

[Nick Jennings]

Informative report there Rick. Thanks for sharing. There are so many
options out there these days it's always nice to hear others
recommendations.

- Nick

On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 02:24:40AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> 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  
> 
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