On Sun, 30 Sep 2001 21:07:51 -0400 Ian Marchak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am looking at building a machine on a shoestring, actually using some
> existing parts and blah blah, you get the idea.
>
My kinda' guy!
> I have decided I want to go down the Athlon route...
>
Nice start. Prices have really been dropping like leaves lately. I've seen
$30 256meg
sdrams at work...
> One board that has shown favorable reviews for quality and reliability,
> the ECS K7S5A, which includes AC97 audio (which is supposed to be the
> same across al boards is it not?). "SiS 7012 PCI" are the specs from
> the ECS website. And a built-in NIC, which according to the ECS site is
> a: "SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet".
>
I favor SOYO TEC, but have no experience with their athlon boards. However,
like
their k6-2 cousins... they probably do very well.
> After digging into these two items, I found links to driver info for the
> SiS900 NIC which has apparently been supported for some time, both on
> the ECS site and on the web.
>
> However the the SiS7012 search didn't fare as well. With Skippy's
> recent posts on the subject of AC97 sound I am concerned it won't work.
> Along those lines, can these AC97 devices be disabled? I am wondering
> if this thing will mung up or otherwise interfere with my ability to use
> a known functional sound card based.
>
I've got some experience with ac97 on some compaq boxes at work. They're
equiped with ess sound chips. Caldera 3.1 will install on them without
problems and even detect the sound system. It loads the right chip driver
along
with the ac97_codec driver. Since the onboard sound chip sucked for VOIP, I
did a shut down, turned off the box, plugged in a soundblaster value live
(PCI)
sound card and rebooted the machine. After I got to a console, I rmmod the
maestro3 sound driver, modprobe or insmod (whatever you like) the sb live
driver emuk10k and bingo... the ess stuff is disabled, my sb card is running
like a champ. VOIP works pretty good on this compaq stuff too.
On the PCI bus, the irq's are passed out to the various cards so as to not
cause any
conflicts. Since I don't load the driver for the ess chips, they are
more-or-less cut out
of the system. I'm not real thrilled by doing this, but there's no way, short
of removing
the chips off the motherboard, to disable them othewise.
Is that good enough for disabling the onboard hardware? Seems to be. There's
no
unusual problems or anything out of the ordinary.
> Can anyone shed some light on this? I stopped paying attention to
> Hardware for too long and am playing catch up.
>
You never catch up, Ian, the best we can hope to do is surf the crest... :')
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