Re: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
On June 8, 2001 08:55 am, you wrote: Question, in the machines mentioned below did you use the 80wire connection cables on your hard drives or the old standard 40 wire cables? From what I have read on the net this can become an issue with CDROM drives and via chipsets if the 40wire cables are used. SNIP Excellent point Dennis. You are absolutely correct - standard IDE cables are a problem when used w/ VIA based Socket A motherboards. The systems I detailed earlier are my own personal equipment, and run high speed IDE cables on all controllers. My experience w/ SA/VIA boards goes beyond this though, as I own a small OEM and ship approx. 30 to 40 SA/VIA systems per month. We first started noticing problems late last summer - regardless of O/S - when running burners on the secondary master w/ standard cables. As soon as we switched to high speed IDE cables read/write errors disappeared. So, without a question I would recommend only using high speed IDE cables on SA/VIA based systems. Regards, SpeedMan
Re: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
On Friday 08 June 2001 09:38, SpeedMan wrote: On June 8, 2001 08:55 am, you wrote: Question, in the machines mentioned below did you use the 80wire connection cables on your hard drives or the old standard 40 wire cables? From what I have read on the net this can become an issue with CDROM drives and via chipsets if the 40wire cables are used. SNIP Excellent point Dennis. You are absolutely correct - standard IDE cables are a problem when used w/ VIA based Socket A motherboards. The systems I detailed earlier are my own personal equipment, and run high speed IDE cables on all controllers. My experience w/ SA/VIA boards goes beyond this though, as I own a small OEM and ship approx. 30 to 40 SA/VIA systems per month. We first started noticing problems late last summer - regardless of O/S - when running burners on the secondary master w/ standard cables. As soon as we switched to high speed IDE cables read/write errors disappeared. So, without a question I would recommend only using high speed IDE cables on SA/VIA based systems. Regards, SpeedMan OK--do this Put two disk drives on different channels on a 686B southbridge board Activate DMA . Our kernel won't, so load kernel-linus2.4 or use another 2.4 distro or even win2K. copy a partition of at least 100 Mb between them. Try a diff. This error seems VERY reproducible. If it is reproducible here, it makes one wonder about other problems. (I have experienced several myself, and I used to swear by VIA). http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-1-en.html But also, now a bug in the KT133A Northbridge has been confirmed. Information on the bugs and the _fixes_ are at that site. The good news is that there are fixes. The bad news is that I will have a difficult time trusting again, and so will many others. Even those who have had clean records may have just been dodging a hidden bullet. http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/index.php?fn=view_threadt=3394 Was VIA's official statement. The original testers did state the problem was _exacerbated_ by the presence of a Creative Sound Card, but also were able to show the bug without it. http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-2-en.html They show a do-it-yourself patch for systems without creative soundcards. They also say that the problem can occur with ANY PCI cards that generate DMA traffic and may even occur without it. Well I have watched Seagate ST34xxxA and ST38421A drives freeze solid on boot with RH and Caldera and Mandrake 6.0 on a VIA MVP3. I have watched warm reboots fail on FIC boards using KT133 with a nice Duron (I have two dead KT133 boards in my collection, they simply stopped powering up though the memory and all the cards and the processor were fine on other systems), so my experience with VIA has been clouded with failures. The same could be said for some others, like older PCChips boards, and the newer ASUS boards (when did they start soldering in the BIOS--is someone new in ownership who decided to cash in on the excellent ASUS reputation?). The fact is, you can't tell much any more by brand name. You pays your money and you takes your chances. When has it ever been different? Probably VIA Chipsets will be better designed and less underpriced than in the past, because of this huge scare. Still those who lost their work will probably harbor bitterness for a long time, even though people repeat often that Data Not Backed Up is Data Lost. Civileme
Re: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
The chipset to avoid is VIA with the 686B Southbridge. This means most modern KT133As and Apollo Pros. That is a large portion of the Motherboard Market That's nice to read, I recently bought Abit a KT7A. :~( I should have known this before... What disadvantages did I get, Civileme? My LG 8120B DVD-drive is installed as a normal CD-rom drive, has it something to do with that? Can someone tell me how to change it to a DVD-drive as it is supposed to be? Or a direct link where to find info about how to do this? The DVD playing HOWTO was not very helpful yet. I will copy a piece of my /etc/fstab down here. /mnt/cdrom is my LG DVD, and /mnt/cdrom2 is my ide burner /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom 0 0 /mnt/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom2 0 0 /mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount fs=vfat,dev=/dev/fd0 0 0 Gerard
Re: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
On Friday 08 June 2001 12:18 pm, Mark Stewart wrote: The chipset to avoid is VIA with the 686B Southbridge. This means most modern KT133As and Apollo Pros. That is a large portion of the Motherboard Market Really? I bought a Tyan Trinity 400 S1854 specifically to run Mandrake. The spec sheets lists the chipset as VIA Apollo Pro 133A (VT82C694X VT82C596A). I'm guesssing the latter two identifiers are the north and southbridge. If so am I safe? It's been running Mandrake 7.2 quite reliably so far... I have the same motherboard; I've successfully run Manrake 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and now 8.0 on it, as well as a few other distributions. Also Windows 98 and 98SE with no motherboard-related problems AFAIK, although Windows has enough problems of its own that a mobo-related bug could easily go unnoticed. In this vein, it would be really great if Mandrake were to start listing motherboards along with the rest of the hardware compatible lists. The comments people have made to the effect of VIA is well known for having problems are somewhat exasperating to folks like myself who researched their purchases heavily yet still apparently made the wrong choices because they didn't also read the kernel dev mailing list. I like this idea! It may be that some motherboards with the problematic VIA chipsets somehow avoid those problems, which would suggest that the problems occur only when the chipsets are combined with other components in a particular manner. IOW, it may be the overall design of the motherboard that's the culprit, and not necessarily the particular chipset. -- Walter Luffman, [EMAIL PROTECTED]Medina, TN USA Supercharged with extra glucose! (Type 2 diabetic 5/99, d/e/m) Sage, purple 1998 Honda VT1100C Shadow Spirit
RE: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
Warning: this is off topic for the list. Speedman wrote On top of that even w/ only loading the drivers I have seen a number of machines stop booting until the Creative card was removed. I have a Compaq 7471 that I have done a lot of hardware upgrading to. About 2 weeks ago I attempted to reinstall the Compaq software and Win98 CDs that accompany my computer. Well, I had so many problems trying to get it to install, after I opened up my box and set up the hardware to mimic the factory condition it came as. Eventually the install program wouldn't even attempt to run. So I figured what the heck and bought the standard WinME so I could stop opening up my system and just install the friggin Windows OS. Well it installed fine, I did have to disconnect my second hard drive, but not a biggie for me. Well every so often when first installing the major software components (Voodoo 5500 software, SB Live! Platinum, Adaptec Easy CD 4) WinME wouldn't boot up. It would stop at the WinME logo just before it. So I'd reinstall, and reinstall, and reinstall everything. I narrowed it down to my Creative SB Live hardware. Win98 never gave me problems with it and my oboard audio. After about a week of reinstalling various software, including WinME, I found out I had to make my onboard soundcard disabled in the profile as well as keep it from existing in any hardware profiles before it would work. No, this answer was not posted on creative's site, but a different problem posted gave me the idea. During the past two weeks for at least three times a day I thought to myself, Linux works just fine, Linux doesn't do that. The moral of the story, so long as the hardware is supported, Linux works just fine, Linux doesn't do that :^) Sincerely and respectfully, Hans N.
RE: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
The chipset to avoid is VIA with the 686B Southbridge. This means most modern KT133As and Apollo Pros. That is a large portion of the Motherboard Market Really? I bought a Tyan Trinity 400 S1854 specifically to run Mandrake. The spec sheets lists the chipset as VIA Apollo Pro 133A (VT82C694X VT82C596A). I'm guesssing the latter two identifiers are the north and southbridge. If so am I safe? It's been running Mandrake 7.2 quite reliably so far... In this vein, it would be really great if Mandrake were to start listing motherboards along with the rest of the hardware compatible lists. The comments people have made to the effect of VIA is well known for having problems are somewhat exasperating to folks like myself who researched their purchases heavily yet still apparently made the wrong choices because they didn't also read the kernel dev mailing list. ::mark
Re: [newbie] Motherboard inquiry
On Thursday 07 June 2001 19:20, s wrote: Seems I have to replace my mobo, an Abit SE6 due to a blown ps/2 port and can't hold out the 2 or 3 weeks for warranty service. So, which chipset is it that we should avoid? I'd like to continue to use my current hardware which is exclusively ide, sdram 133 and pIII cpu. Any suggestions for a good one (mobo or chipset)? Asus and Abit have done messed up on me, but I have an open mind... :-) I've had pretty good luck with biostar, what do you think about them? TIA, -s Look for Shuttle (www.spacewalker.com) with an SiS630 chipset. It will accommodate your current hardware and nothing is more linux-friendly. It does have a very nice on-board 3D graphics and GPL drivers for everything but the possibly included PCTel Linmodem are on the SiS site and GPLed. The PCTel driver is not GPL. The chipset to avoid is VIA with the 686B Southbridge. This means most modern KT133As and Apollo Pros. That is a large portion of the Motherboard Market There is also a Matsonic with the SiS 630 chipset, MS7308E, and perhaps some from Amptron or PCChips (and their quality seems to have risen recently though I used to hate them). Naturally most Intel Chipsets, except the 820, are probably OK. The SiS 630 and 730 and the Intel GX chipsets are the ones where the BIOS can be directly replaced by linux Boot to framebuffer X in 3 seconds, anyone? Civileme
