Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 Motherboard Strangeness -- nVidia PCI IDs on C51 (GF61x0+nF4x0)

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2005-12-27 at 22:56 -0500, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> #1 -- I also installed a Plextor PX-716SA DVD-RW drive. This is an SATA 
> drive and I can't boot off it with a bootable DVD. The drive is 
> installed on the motherboard's SATA2 connector (this is a plain SATA 
> connector, item #13 on page 2 of the manual. It is not item #10, "Serial 
> SATAII connector", the red one.) 

In Windows, that drive is _only_ guaranteed to work on the SATA channels
Intel ICH6 or ICH7 southbridge chips.  The reason is simple, there is a
_huge_ augmentation of the ATA register/support to support ATA
Peripheral Interface (ATAPI) devices such as optical drives.

In other words, do _not_ buy SATA ATAPI devices today.  The overwhelming
majority of SATA controllers can't support ATAPI, and there are some
missing industry standards for doing such.  In fact, the Plextor is
using a simple ATA-to-SATA converter inside the PX-716A, so the driver
is -- in fact, just an standard ATAPI drive.

> #2 -- I'm interpreting the PLED pins of the System Panel Header (item 
> #17 on page 2 of the manual) to mean Power LED. On my Lian Li case, the 
> Power LED wires are 2 wires in a 3-pin connector. The middle connector 
> pin is empty. Yet, the PLED pins on the motherboard header are for a 
> 2-pin connector.

Move the appropriate GND or +5VDC to the appropriate pin.  I do that
all-the-time.

> But wait! Just to the left of it is the Chassis Speaker Header, item 
> #18, and if you look closely, there is text saying something like 
> "PWRLED" or some such and there are 3 wave-soldered holes on the 
> motherboard right next to the Chassis Speaker Header.
> I'm confused about where to plug in the Power LED connector.
> Any comments?

Some mainboards offer both a 2-pin and a 3-pin LED, yes.
So either will probably do.

When only a 2-pin is offered, I pull out the appropriate GND or +5VDC
and move it to the middle to fit.

> One final note. If you get this motherboard for yourself and install 
> Fedora Core 4 on it, be sure to have the latest glibc and kernel-smp 
> rpm's and install them right after the Fedora install, so that you will 
> have networking available from the onboard NIC.

Yes, it's clear nVidia has changed the PCI IDs on the GeForce 61x0 +
nForce 4x0 ... see my blog entry here ...  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/12/linux-on-nvidia-c51nv44-nforce.html  

So it is _not_ the same as the other chips in nForce4/Pro series.

> The system seems very nice -- I'm using it now, restoring backed up data 
> to the new drive. The 4400 processor seems nice and speedy.

You're going to see improved response time because of how Linux handles
MP scheduling.  The Linux kernel prefers to sacrifice response time for
throughput, by minimizing re-entry and the associated context switching.
On MP, you can now have 2 re-entries without any additional context
switching -- and the response time on a desktop or workstation is
noticable from the user-level.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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