Mainboard suggestions?

[Francois Tigeot]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 12:39:15AM -0500, John Wilson wrote:
> 
> I am currently in the process of spec'ing a new machine for myself and wish
> to go the AMD64 way.  Unfortunately, trying to find good information on
> the myriad of mainboards that are available is giving me a serious
> headache. :)
> 
> >From what I've been able to gather, the two best mainboards for the AMD64
> platform come from either Asus or MSI.  My original goal was to find a board
> with the minimum of additional features onboard, save for sound and a NIC.
> Firewire is useless to me.
> 
> I've attempted browsing the AMD64 mailling list here for good info, but have
> come away scratching my head even more.  Basically, my questions are as
> follows:
> 
> - Which is the better chipset for FreeBSD, the Via offering or the NVidia one?

I believe NForce 3 chipsets have some teething problems.

> - It seems that a lot of the MSI boards use Realtek audio and NIC's.  Are these
> any good?  Are they at all supported?  My understanding was that Realtek was
> on the crappy side, but I've no personal experience with them.

The Realtek NIC found on Athlon64 boards is not the crappy rl(4). It
supports at least hardware checksum offloading...

> - It appears that Asus has problems with their onboard NIC as well; there were
> a few messages posted to the list in regard to this.  Is this still a problem?
> Should I avoid Asus because of this?
> 
> - If anyone could make a suggestion as to the best mainboard, in regard to
> FreeBSD compatibility, I'd be most appreciative.

I use a MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R and everything works flawlessly including the
onboard NIC and sound.

-- 
Francois Tigeot