What kind of MotherBoard is better for FreeBsd and linux?

[Toll, Eric]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of
Francisco
> Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 10:56 AM
> To: Adriaan de Groot
> Cc: freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: What kind of MotherBoard is better for
FreeBsd and linux?
> 
> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> 
> > I think the motherboards list could use a redesign so
that 
> it carries 
> > _more_ information.
> 
> 
> I think the design is fine, BUT it should be more
specific. 
> People should report what they know to work. We should 
> probably get rid of the "functional" and "fully 
> functional"... OR define what "fully functional" 
> means.
> 

I *did* put quite a lot of info into the notes, but they
(the person updating the HTML) truncated it to: "SATA
untested" for the Gigabyte board I submitted (GA-7A8DW) -- I
had a small paragraph of notes to include which again were
*truncated*.


The reason SATA was untested was that I found there were
issues getting RAID to raid to work on the Sil chips, just
from reading this list.

People on list said 3Ware was a good way to go and GA-7A8DW
is on the 3Ware certified motherboard listing.  For $148.00
US the (2) channel 64bit 3Ware card is a no-brainer.  But
still some choose to ignore research and go after boards
with questionable chipsets, then try to make something like
RAID work on unsupported hardware that may be cheap, poorly
designed and flawed to begin with.  Stop buying the Kia and
expecting the Mercedes, a little bit of research will go a
long way.  I am by no means a FreeBSD expert (just ask
Roland Smith!  <grin>) , but I have setup servers long
enough to know you get what you pay for.  

I really was thrify with my server anyway.  I spent
$1,800.00 USD total for a EATX 550 Watt Antec quiet case,
(2) 250Gb RAID edition drives, (2) 64 bit 242 Opteron
processors, 1 Gb of ECC Reg DDR 400 Ram (certified to work
with GA-7A8DW), the GA-7A8DW mainboard and the 3Ware raid
controller.  The dual operton servers I see online start at
$3K USD and don't even come with RAID....

Stop buying the Kia and expecting the Mercedes!  I am quite
sure someone can come up with much better recipies for an
AMD64 box than I have.
Research is a wonderful thing.



Eric