Reliable Athlon 64 motherboards

[Robert L Cochran]

My Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 board (currently running the 1.5 BIOS revision) 
is great. It enabled me to upgrade to an Athlon X2 4400+ and recycle my 
some older hardware: 2 Gb of Adata PC3200 memory and a now-ancient ATI 
All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro AGP video card. I could add a PCI Express video 
board to this motherboard, and presumably, it will also easily convert 
to a new processor type.

At the last check, this motherboard doesn't support my Plextor PX-716SA 
dual layer DVD writer. I think Plextor (and Outpost.com, the reseller) 
were at the very least a bit dishonest by not saying clearly at the top 
of the product description, "This optical device only works on certain 
motherboards. The list of compatible boards is here ----." In fairness, 
Outpost.com did agree to RMA the device for me. I missed the deadline 
for returning the drive, so it is still here with me. I'm using my old 
Sony DVD writer -- which is slower than an arthritic sloth, but it works.

I still feel that Plextor shafted me and probably quite a few other 
users too. This was a good lesson -- always check optical drives for 
compatibility issues, don't assume that an optical drive will "just 
work" as long as you have the right physical interface (IDE, SATA). 
Always keep the original packaging, too, until you are absolutely sure 
the new hardware really works.

Other than this one gripe I'm happy with the board.

Replacing this board with one compatible with the Plextor drive doesn't 
make much sense. It's a lot of work just for an optical drive and who 
knows if I'll bend a processor pin while transferring the proc. Besides 
I'm becoming really interested in embedded devices and just started 
studying "TCP/IP Lean Second Edition" by Jeremy Betham.

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA


Jeremy Sanders wrote:

> Hi - We're looking for a reliable Athlon 64 motherboard. Hopefully 
> this will support 4600+ (dual core) processors, SATA, and hopefully 
> gigabit networking. Reliability is the key. Is there such a thing?
>
> We've tried using an MSI K8NGM2-FID, based on the nforce chipset. This 
> works fine and the gigabit forcedeth appears reliable with the latest 
> kernel update. However it oopses every few days for no apparent reason.
>
> We've also tried an Asus A8V-E SE (VIA chipset), but this appears 
> terrible. The sky2 driver works (with the latest kernel update for 
> 4.2, or the latest RHEL jwl test kernels), but then hangs after an 
> hour or two of transferring data. We then tried a tg3 network card and 
> an e1000, and this corrupts the data transferred between it and 
> another computer. Maybe it is the SATA corrupting the data, but who 
> knows. No obvious errors in the logs except for lost ticks. Tried 
> non-SMP, 32 bit, noapic, acpi=off. No luck.
>
> Does anyone have a recommendation for a reliable board? Otherwise we 
> have to buy Intel and get the speed loss...
>
> Many thanks
>
> Jeremy
>