Peter Clark <pc451 at yahoo.com> wrote: > > I am in the process of slowly putting together my owm box. Right > now, I am waiting for my tax returns :) so that I have some spending > $$$ to build the box I've always wanted. But in the meantime, I would > like to ask a few questions. > 1. What would you recommend for a motherboard? I want to get an > Athlon 1000, so that narrows down things fast. Furthermore, I recall > hearing something last week about a bug with Abit? motherboards. OR was > it just the VIA chipset? I don't know, but I would like to avoid this > if possible. I've been pondering this myself, since I have a VIA chipset that has been showing problems as well. I have the VIA 82c586b chipset for my K6-2 system, a predecessor to the current 686b chipset that has been causing so much trouble with Athlon boards, and I spent the last day getting my system re-installed due to filesystem corruption. Just a few notes about that: I know that Linux 2.2 is more stable on the VIA chipsets, though it seems that nobody has really figured out why. I'm certain that there are cases when running 2.2 where the system is unstable. For instance, I have always had difficulty burning CD-ROMs on this computer -- long, continuous streams of data are problematic. I also got filesystem corruption with ReiserFS on this system while running 2.2, but it's entirely possible that ReiserFS was to blame, and not the chipset. Random crashes when ripping CD audio, etc. Still, that's better than running 2.4 at this point. I've heard about a few things that have helped. One, which is relatively strange, is to compile the kernel optimized for Pentium chips, rather than Athlons. Some people have also seen improvements by making their BIOS settings more conservative. Note that the 586b and 686b are southbridge chips that interface with the PCI and AGP bus, along with the IDE subsystem. There are (IIRC) 586a and 686a chipsets that are for the _north_bridge, which is the interface to memory and cache, if I remember right. Some motherboards mix northbridge and southbridge chipsets between companies, so you might have a board with an AMD 760 northbridge with a VIA 686b southbridge. Obviously, it looks like the 686b should be avoided. From what I understand, this often shows up under the `KT133' label. I'm not sure if the `KT266' boards use the same chipset or not. Of course, I'm not really a `hardware guy' or a `kernel guy,' so don't take my word for it... -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ No radio. Already stolen. / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]