Fedora Core 3 Motherboard Recommendations

[James Wilkinson]

Rick Meyer wrote:
> Some of the Manufacturers I
> have looked at include ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and DFI.

then, later:
> Reliability and stability of the main board is critical.

Looks like you're looking at the right sort of brands, then.

> I have had some not so nice experiences with
> the SIS chipsets

How long ago was that? It's my experience that some of the chipsets they
were selling about five years ago, for the AMD K6-2, were *very* bad.
Since then, they seem to have got better (it would have been difficult
to have done otherwise and stayed in business).

> - so are the NVIDIA chipsets better for Fedora? Or is a
> different chipset the way to go?

As you've found, both chipset and motherboard manufacturers are
important (and, in my experience, the two biggest factors in the
stability of the system). Nvidia have a good reputation: Via also seem
to be pretty good. Intel, at least as a chipset manufacturer, has a very
good reputation.

Most chipsets sold seem to come from one of these three manufacturers:
ATi seem to have a larger market share of the Intel CPU chipset market
than the AMD one. This is more important for ongoing compatibility than
anything else.

> I think manufactures should release some
> MTBF rates for the motherboards.

One can estimate MTBF rates for something like hard drives, which will
have one of two or three basic access pattens. But motherboards can be
used and abused in so many slightly different ways that the only way
that you can find out the MTBF with any accuracy is to actually wait
until a fair proportion of the motherboards fail (which should mean at
least five years).

Details like the manufacturer of the capacitors and the way the
motherboard is mounted can make a big difference.

>  Also I have come across the NVIDIA SLI
> certification.  It sounds close to what I want when I purchase a bunch of
> motherboards.

Hmm. SLI implies PCI Express. I've got a new and very nice Athlon 64 PCI
Express system for personal use, and I'm very pleased with it, but I
think it's still a little new for a super stable system. On the other
hand, if you're expecting to keep the systems and upgrade them, PCI
Express will give you more flexibility in the future.

You might find it worth looking at some of the overclocking features:
stuff like extra cooling of capacitors and better power distribution
helps motherboard stability even at normal speeds.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
James Wilkinson       | "Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating
Exeter    Devon    UK | gun.  And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates.
E-mail address: james | (pulls trigger)  Well, what you do know,
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