Best/energy efficient CPU/Chipset/Motherboard for 64bit Fedora?

James Wilkinson fedora at westexe.demon.co.uk
Tue Jan 3 07:42:11 UTC 2006


I wrote:
> At least my Asus NF4 motherboard seems to support everything
> with Open Source software. Everything I need, anyway.

dondi_2006 asked:
> which board/chipset exactly? And what is not supported, even if
> you don't use it?

Well, mine's a A8N-SLI ATX motherboard (which won't fit your case), with
a NForce 4 SLI chipset. Like you, I wanted PCI Express for
future-proofing. The SLI wasn't expensive when I got the board, which
did everything I wanted (and there weren't many AMD PCI Express boards
to choose from at the time). And I'm not convinced that 250 MB/s is
going to be enough for the foreseeable future, so although I don't
intend to use the SLI capability for its advertised purpose
(accelerating 3D games), it's nice to have a spare 8x slot if I need it.

As for "what is not supported": what I meant was that everything I have
tried works. Everything I haven't tried I don't know about, because I
haven't tried it. I think that's mainly the IEEE 1394 and the SATA
ports.

Although having said that, the Usual Place says that the SATA side works
( http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html ). And I've no reason to
believe the 1394 ports won't work.

I suppose I should point out that the on-board NVidia Ethernet device
works well with the in-kernel forcedeth driver, but that this driver
does not support all the offload capabilities of the hardware. For
example, there is supposed to be a hardware firewall in the chipset.
That's not supported: you have to fall back to the Linux kernel
firewall. This isn't a major drawback of the chipset: on any other
on-board Ethernet device, you simply wouldn't have the capability there,
rather than "there but disabled".

A few more features should be supported in future kernels. For example,
it looks like hardware TX checksumming and scatter gather and
segmentation offload support is coming:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-November/msg00442.html
If you don't know what these are, they mean the hardware can do some of
the work that the kernel would otherwise have to do.

I should note that I have seen (and used under Windows) a micro-ATX
version of this board. It only has one 16x PCI Express slot: the rest
are PCI. But it looks like
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=15&l3=0&model=768&modelmenu=1
is the current equivalent: this does have on-board video and an extra
PCI Express slot. It doesn't have the NVidia Ethernet device, though.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
Home: james           | They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | insane. But you don't have to believe that, and nor
Work: James.Wilkinson | does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled
@sparex.co.uk         | past.  -- Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent




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