New board for a newbie

[Tommi Lätti]

Brian Myers wrote:

> 2) I've seen much conversation on which boards, memory, and SATA 
> controllers were supported by FreeBSD. So much so that I have no idea 
> what the current state of things is. So, if you were building a new dual 
> Opteron from scratch, what would you get? For cost reasons, I'm going 
> with 1.8 ghz processors and probably only 2GB of ram. I'll have two RAID 
> 1 SATA hard drives, but should I use an onboard controller, or purchase 
> a separate controller? Note that I may at some point upgrade to 4 RAID 
> 0+1 disks. What about video cards? I don't need much so, are the onboard 
> ones useable or not? Also, I, of course, would like the onboard LAN 
> controller to be supported.

Well, I just went from dual p3 to dual opteron. The machine is in 
housing facility and has been rock solid since it's installation 2 
months ago.

For MB I used Tyan K8S Pro. Not the cheapest one around but I require 
stability and Tyan uses good components.

Memory is 4x512M ECC Reg from Kingston. The memory modules were listed 
on AMD website (the same series was listed...).

I also got 2x37G Barracudas (SATA) and used the boards SATA controller 
to attach them. I then used gmirror to build raid-1 out of them. Booting 
from that array works just nicely.

As the machine is in housing, I really don't care about video 
controller, the integrated one serves just nicely as the console video.

All three of the on-board NIC's are usable. Don't know about gigabit 
performance since I didn't need one.

-- 
br,
Sty