nForce4 motherboard recommendations

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 10:56:58PM -0500, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I hope this isn't too off topic.  This list is fairly slow, so
> hopefully y'all won't mind this question.  I'm looking at building a
> new desktop AMD64 system and am trying to decide on a motherboard to
> buy.  I want one with an nForce4 chipset and preferably in the ~$100

Recently, my designated home-RAID-server-to-be has croaked, so I wound
up purchasing a motherboard (Asus A8N-E), Athlon64 3000+ with Venice core,
and an extra stick of 512 MByte DDR memory. Unfortunately that board
took 24-pin ATX power connectors, so I had to purchase a new power 
supply as well, as mine was only 20-pin.

I choose that board because it is cheap, doesn't have SLI (it's a
server), has nForce4 ultra chipset with GBit Ethernet and 4 DIMM
slots. I also verified the hardware was fully supported by recent
Linux kernels (I had to use Ubuntu Server 5.10 AMD64, as Debian AMD
64 Sarge didn't support all hardware out of the box, while the
daily unstable .iso images were, well, unstable.

The only minus of that board is a noisy chipset fan which is
prone to failures (I will probably have to replace it at some point).
A deluxe version of that board comes with SLI and heatpipe cooling
of the chipset

> or less range.  As far as features, I would like SATA II (the 250 GB
> WD SATA II drive is slightly cheaper than the SATA drive!) and SLI
> would be nice, but not necessary.  Of course, I want to run 64-bit
> Linux on it (FC4), so good compatibility there is a must.  Decent
> onboard sound would be a plus, but again not critical.  Quietness
> would be nice too.  I most importantly want good quality and
> dependability.  So, what brands do you like as far as quality?  Or
> what specific (desktop) boards do you like?  I'm looking hard at the
> GIGABYTE GA-K8N-SLI which is inexpensive, has SLI, and has the plus of
> having passive cooling on the north bridge (assuming it stays cool). 
> The DFI nF4 Ultra-Infinity is right there at about the same price, has
> 1394 but no SLI.  Any suggestions?
> Also, I could forgo the SATA II and get a board with just SATA and
> potentially save $10 - $20 (could either save a little on a Maxtor
> drive, or spend a little more on a WD drive, I'm not particular to
> either).  Thoughts on that?

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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