AMD Athlon64 Systems -- dual-940 boards with AGP+PCI-X are still costly ...

[Warren Togami]

leam wrote:
> So, for those of us who are AMD fans but don't know a lot about 
> motherboard selection and history, what is recommended? Who are the 
> "good" producers? What is good to read up on this before shopping?

http://amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID=259
The owner of amdmb.com reviewed the MSI NEO motherboard here.  I'm the 
customer that ordered an Athlon64 from Jesse at Pogo Linux.  They took 
the opportunity to do some testing on the Athlon64 because they may 
consider shipping it as a regular product in the future.  I'm the guinea 
pig.

While this particular motherboard has onboard SATA, I opted to order a 
regular PATA drive because SATA probably is not yet supported by the 
Linux kernel, and it would probably take longer for it to be reliable on 
AMD64.  That's only a guess though, I haven't really searched much about 
this.

I will know early next week if I've been screwed by buying this 
motherboard or not. =)  If all goes well, during November I plan on 
doing a bunch of 32bit vs. 64bit Linux tests comparing relative 
performance numbers with stuff compiled for x86 and AMD64.  The results 
will be published in an amdmb.com article.  This should be interesting. 
  Right now the tests I could think of include:

* openssl "speed" test
* oggenc

Any other suggestions?

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com