On Tuesday 04 February 2003 08:38 pm, BCSoft wrote: > Greetings, > Just bought (on impulse -- damn) an Athalon K7SEM mb by some generic vendor > at a recent computer show. It's working (dual boot W98/ML9) but not without > some trials. I'm wondering if the all-in-one type of board has more > problems than the add-a-card. Rich
OK I have run the ASUS A7N266-VM with no problems, and full acceleration off a Mandrake Prosuite DVD installation (8.2). I have put together a few computers using 630 and 730 SiS chipsets (both all-in-one) and have had only minor problems (for me) in installation, but no problems at all with 9.0 or 9.1Beta3. I am looking for a K7SEM with a socketed 24-Pin DIP BIOS installed. The one with edge-grip BIOS is useless to me. Why? Well, I have a package adapted from the Linux BIOS project with linux kernel, vi, nano, Python, GTK+ and FramebufferX (not to mention ROX) and I have a 32M DiskOnChip in a 24 pin DIP. Booting once with Linux, loading the build I have, then hotswapping the BIOS chip for the DiskOnChip and Flashing my package into BIOS, I have a useful system that boots in less than 5 seconds and can then bring in whatever else it needs from HD at leisure while I am already looking at a nice desktop. Single-Boards are usually rather proprietary except the ones with SiS chipsets which have been classicly linux-friendly. The manufacturers of distros have not necessarily kept up with recognition of these boards bacause they do not have a huge sales volume, so for example in 8.0 and 8.1 the sound had to be configured post-install cause the ALSA drivers were misconfigured for those boards and the OSS drivers worked better. Also the networking interfaces at times needed special support. Now the NForce Chipset needed help with 9.0, at least for certain boards while others worked out of the box. Single Boards have these obvious PRos -Low cost (relative to the same hardware in several packages) -Compact size (not always) -Higher reliability in the sense of greater MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure). You see Electronics packages have an infant death syndrome but once past that, the failure rate is single digits per hundred thousand device hours. So with fewer, many fewer, devices to fail on the computer, the overall reliability has to be higher. If some manufacturer would remove head from backorifice and put tantalytic Caps on the board, the lifetime would be far greater than the useful life of the technology on the board (but it if does what you bought it to do, you CANNOT consider it obsolete). and these Obvious Cons Limited expandability Not usually the fastest performers Not generally for gaming aficianados (except the Nforce) Proprietary Drivers (Only the Nforce) IF something breaks, then the replacement is the WHOLE board. But I say again--most of the single-boards have excellent manufacturer based linux support with drivers regularly released to kernel.org (except the NForce, which is stuck with proprietary drivers for 3D accel for the on-board Geforce and is a taint on the linux kernel when installed, but even there the drivers for the sound and ethernet are free software) and most distros pay them little attention because single-boards are a low-population item. Intel 810 and 815 chipsets have quite a spotty history, but then Intel treated them almost like poor cousins in its driver releases; however, those chipsets today work like a charm with most linux distros and Mandrake installs without a hiccup and onften without even asdking you if you want to test anything. The 820 should be avoided altogether regardless how low the price is on the surplus market (Intel recalled them). SiS 630, 730, and 740 Chipsets are well supported. Beware of ANY board with the 845 (pentium4) Chipset. Flaky performance and filesystem corruption occurs with Win2K as well as most linux kernels NForce Chipsets offer a single-board (NOT necessarily small) for gamers where additions can be mounted and are often very expandable. The cheapest of them provides a nice experience for gaming folks, and also a relatively inexpensive desktop workstation (and you do NOT have to taint the kernel as the Geforce has perfectly acceptable 2d accel free software drivers which is usually more than needed for a desktop workstation except for a few engineering workstations where something expensive from SGI is likely the first choice. RAID is usually not available on such boards, nor are the cases that surround the Micro-ATX size boards known for a plethora of disk bays. Of course I think IDE RAID is worth the price for the extra IDE interface channels offered and not for the firmware which Linux Software RAID can run circles around anyway. Well that is it for what I know about them, Others can doubtless add issues either pro or con that I have not thought of or do not know. Civileme
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