On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 09:25, Tom Brinkman wrote: > I'm with you. It's not just motherboard revisions, bios updates > either. Chipsets and cpu steppings (production runs) get fixes > usually within the first several months. A good example is the VIA > kt133a. The ide bug surfaced during the first two steppings. Later > it was discovered that many motherboard designs exacerbated the > problem. By step 4 of the kt133a the problem had all but disappeared > (as long as you didn't use an Abit kt7* ;> Later it became apparent > some high bandwith pci cards (specially the SB Live!) were largely > part of the problem. So if you jumped on bandwagon when the KT7 > first appeared, installed an SB Live!, you were pretty much SOL, > 'cept for bios upgrades, and upping the Vcore to 1.82v, and dropping > the HDD mode to <= udma2. Dirty work arounds. Much the same > scenario with cpu steppings.
I think there's a little confusion here about what's a fix and what's a workaround. In my day, a bios upgrade that corrected problems was called a "fix". Since I'm one of those KT7 owners, I can state with some authority that it's not hard to apply a bios flash, since I've done it with this particular board at least four times that I can remember. And I wasn't out to fix problems, because I did'nt really notice any; I was out to take advantage of new bios features. But even if I wasn't and I was in a worse case scenario with an SB card, I would not have been SOL; I would have just downloaded and flashed a new bios into the mainboard. For the record, there's been no problems with this particular Abit KT7. > I also think staying away from the cuttin edge, first releases of > boards and chipsets is very important for open source too. EG, the > people who rushed out to by ATI 8500's and still don't have support > for them yet. There's also work arounds for chipset/cpu errata that > take a while. EG, I have a kt133a board, shortly after I built the > system, months after kt133a boards were out, dmesg began to include > the line "Applying VIA southbridge workaround." Tho since my board > (Soyo, AMD appr'vd) is the second (and final) revision, it's not an > Abit, I don't have an SB Live, and both the chipset and the Tbird are > 4th stepping, I doubt I need that kernel parameter ;) I agree with you as far as the ATI cards go. With the mainboards, and the roundup comparisons, I've never been led astray with regard to Linux yet (knock on wood) in relation to third party mainboard roundups. I respect the AMD approved list, but I don't completely trust it because I believe they are somewhat in a conflict of interests since they produce their own chipset. AFAICT, the third party sites doing reviews are not in that kind of a position and conflict. It's entirely possible that (and I do trust AMD much more than Intel) AMD would not put a motherboard on their approved list if by chance their marketing department deemed the mainboard a viable competition for some of AMD's own product. Not that they do, mind you; I just think it's better business to work from a third party site for information regarding mainboard evaluation. > Then there's also performance regardless of OS. It's reported > that DDR333 has negligible improvement over 266. In some tests it's > actually slower. I attribute this to 266 havin matured, while 333 is > still brand new and wet behind the ears. Not neccesarilly the ram's > fault, but the motherboard's implementation of it. Y'allsMMV ;) > -- > Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas The reference board comparison between 266 and 333 attempt to bear out what you are saying: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q1/020220/kt333-11.html Unfortunately, this isn't the whole story, because the new 333's are production boards, and as such perform much differently than the reference boards; they outperform the KT266A's. In the following graph I direct your attention to the green bars, which happen to be a KT266A and a KT133A, respectively. http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q2/020509/kt333-29.html In comparison to the KT333's there is a substantial difference in performance. Both the older KT266A and the KT133A are close to the bottom of the chart in performance. The Epox, Enmic, and Gigabyte boards consistently perform close to the top of the roundup. In addition, I did a little research on the new Abit KX7-333R mobo and was pleasantly surprised; it outperformed the Epox 8k3a+ in another site's OpenGL benchmarks under Quake 3: http://www.tweakers.com.au/articles/motherboard/abit_kx7333r/page9.asp In theory then, this board would have been at or close to the top of the Dr Tom roundup in those benchmarks. Best Regards, LX -- ��������������������������������������������������� Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5 Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ ���������������������������������������������������
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