Re: good motherboard choice?

[Andrew Atrens <atrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Leimbach wrote:

> Well I think my motherboard has gone crazy.
> 
> I have an ASUS N8X-Deluxe motherboard and it can't boot any of the
> following OpenBSD, FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x or DragonFly.

Wow. I have 4 A7N8X-deluxe boards - some 1.x and some 2.x and have had
zero problems with DFly. The nvidia graphics driver even works (although I
did need to tweak the probe code in nvidia_pci.c a tiny bit ) ...

Two of the boards I've had for about a year, and have successfully run
4.7, 4.8, and 4.9. The other two boards are running DFly. No problems.

> It probably will boot linux but I don't use it anymore since starting with
> FreeBSD.  For some reason Windows seems to work but it BSOD's a lot more
> often than should occur on XP Pro.

Really sounds like you have bad hardware.

> 
> It randomly fails the startup memory tests and I tested the memory to be
> OK.
> 
> Basically I need a new motherboard.  Any recommendations?  I want to keep

I really like my A7N8X-deluxe boards. If you check out Tom's Hardware I 
think the new VIA KT880 chipset is supposed to be marginally quicker, but
their tests were with a VIA reference board, so I'm not sure if any
boards are available yet ...

> my existing Athlon XP 2800+ CPU and the RAM so I need to stick with AMD
> compatible stuff.  I'd rather steer clear of NForce2 based motherboards
> unless someone knows them to work with DragonFly.

As I said, I've had no problems.

> 
> I found a very affordable VIA KT600 based one but I don't know if that's a
> good choice either.
> 
> I am not interested in supporting new hardware on DraonFly... I just want
> a machine that works :)
> 
> Dave