On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Derek Gathright wrote: > NForce2 is bad? Wow, really? That what I've had others suggest to > me. Anyone else wanna chime in?
I wish I was wrong. Really I do. But I have personal experience over 6 months of time working on this board and I have not been happy with it at all. It might not be nforce2 in particular but this particular ASUS board. I can't be sure. But I decided to stay away from it for future systems at least for now. Google around for more info. Here's an entire site about nforce2 problems, though the info is somewhat dated: http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/intro.html Also just poking around now I ran into some review posts on zdnet from a few rather po'ed people having to do specifically with the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe board. For example: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/ASUS_A7N8X_E_Deluxe___mainboard___ATX___nForce2_Ultra_400/4505-3049_16-30705262.html When I first put my nforce2-based system together I was getting hard Linux kernel lockups on the order of every day or so. At the time I was running the 2.6.5 kernel and had just attributed the problems to kernel instability - at the time I was also seeing lockups with that same kernel on a Dell laptop. However the kernel is far better now, and the laptop I'm running simply has never locked up with the 2.6.9 kernel yet I continue to have problems with the nforce2 system. Following information gleaned from the first URL above, I disabled use of the APIC / LAPIC on the system and things got a lot better. Now my system hard locks only once every few weeks, unless I'm trying to burn CDs in which case it locks and/or reboots about once every 15 discs or so. I have other parts in this system (e.g. 2 additional PCI IDE controllers) and it's possible that I may be getting had by multiple problems. I have been very slowly ruling out causes. So I can't say I have the smoking gun evidence which proves that the board is lousy or that with this "one magic jumper change" it all works perfectly. All I can say is in 10 years of running Linux on put-together PCs this particular problem "feels" a lot like a low level instability on the motherboard. (And yes, I've already tested the memory with a 30+ hour session using memtest86 without even one single hiccup.) I for one would love to hear of others who have this board and don't have problems - because I'd like to figure out what's different so I can stabilize my system. In the mean time, I can't in good conscience recommend anything built around nforce2 and especially not this particular motherboard. The Shuttle system I just got not withstanding, the last 3 mainboards I've purchased have all been ASUS. I had some problems with the previous ASUS board too - though I managed to solve that headache within the first 2 weeks (bad dram voltage setting - conflicted with the factory default and had arrived from the vendor that way). I'm not so keen about ASUS anymore, unfortunately. > > I read through everything else and I thank you for your > suggestions/experiences. The "wife-proofing" and WAF will be a big > factor, though not for me, but rather my dad, as this will be his box. > Which brings up the other question... while I've heard many people > say their wives loves their myth boxes, has anyone has bad experiences > with the novice of the house unable to ever grasp Myth? I've had a > partially functional myth box and it seemed extremely easy, but like I > said... looking for maybe some other input here. I can't answer a question like that. At least not yet. I only got hooked on mythtv a few weeks ago. So far the wife hasn't tried to use it - my first HTPC system is still on my workbench as I learn the ropes and meander through various issues. I hit some nasty problems with transcoding in 0.16 (seemed to randomly crash) and so I'm running a CVS snapshot from Saturday now. After one train wreck Sunday night I seem to have gotten the CVS snapshot working pretty well now. I had to take a side trip off to learn more about mysql in order to get past the Sunday foul-up... I still have lots of things to set up here. It's been quite a learning experience. -Mike -- | Mike Isely | PGP fingerprint POSITIVELY NO | | 03 54 43 4D 75 E5 CC 92 UNSOLICITED JUNK MAIL! | isely @ pobox (dot) com | 71 16 01 E2 B5 F5 C1 E8 | |
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