I don't want to start an argument of anykind, but I've been using
DFI motherboards for years. I've also had good luck with MSI, and
Gigabyte boards too. I'll admit, the DFI boards can be pricey, but they
are reliable.
That's just my 2 cents worth.
Jim
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:00 -0500, Paul wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 11:01 +0800, Mel wrote:
> > > Slightly OT, but what are the best boards for CentOS (if any) and how do
> > > ECS boards stack up?
> > >
> >
> > I strongly recommend staying away from ASRock boards.
> >
> > I recently had an MB die. The only replacement I could afford that was
> > available quickly was an ASRock. I bought it and have been suffering
> > ever since.
>
> My daughter's system running FC6 on an ASRock P4i65G (intel 865G chipset
> based) works fine ... onboard sound, video, networking, IDE & SATA. I've
> been happy with their Intel chipset boards in the past.
>
> >
> > My old board had 3 parallel IDE devices. The new board can only support
> > 2. OK. This is not special to ASRock. But ....
> >
> > I got 2 new SATA drives to go with it. I thought I would set them up in
> > a RAID configuration. Was I wrong.
> >
> > This MB apparently has some special BIOS code that only works with M$
> > software. There is NO Linux support for it. I found other references to
> > this on the net.
> >
> > ASRock support simply replied to use the Nvidia drives from the Nvidia
> > site. Well they didn't solve the BIOS problem. ASRock did not reply when
> > I re-asked for their help.
> >
> > CentOS 4 will not recognize these drives.
> >
> > I am now using FC6 and booting with NODMRAID. By doing this I was
> > finally able to use booth drives. If I don't use NODMRAID, I get device
> > mapping and everything is fine until I reboot - there is that BIOS
> > problem again.
>
> The motherboard almost certainly uses "Fake Raid" and other than
> initially booting the OS is pretty dim. This is the same as 99.9% of
> all other desktop boards that advertize having RAID. The only boards
> you see "Real RAID" are high-end workstation boards and server boards. I
> would not fault ASRock for this.
>
> See http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
>
> It comes down to doing research as to what hardware is supported in your
> distrobution of choice before buying the hardware. If you are using a
> fairly cutting edge distro like Fedora, OpenSuSE or Ubutu and the
> chipset is at least a year or so old your probably OK, but if you want
> the latest wizz-bang chipset your probably not going to be happy trying
> to install linux on it.
>
> My personal preference is usually Gigabyte & ASRock for budget boards
> and Tyan & ASUS for mid to upper range desktop boards.
>
> Regards,
> Paul Berger
>
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