[x86-64] Opteron motherboard recommendations

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wednesday 20 August 2003 15:31, Brad Barnett wrote:
> G'day,
>
> I was speaking to Bart the other day, and he mentioned that the MSI K8D
> Master had a memory bandwidth issue on CPU1, but otherwise was very stable
> under Linux.

The server boards (K8D Master, Thunder K8S, ...) also have only limited use 
for workstations, because they need special cases (E-ATX), PCI cards (3.3V 
capable) and power supply. They also tend to be quite expensive.

> Does anyone have any motherboard recommendations for me?  Anyone have any
> "stay away from" recommendations?
The Asus SK8N was recently tested in the german c't magazine. They found
that it doesn't even work out of the box with current 32 bit linux 
distributions. There is no source code available for the nvidia nForce3
chipset on it, so you won't be able to use the onboard LAN, IDE and AGP
connectors in the near future, at least with 64 bit kernels.

The Tyan Tomcat K8S board (single opteron, onboard lan, vga, 6xpci) sounds
like a good deal and all the onboard hardware should work fine, but it is
very hard to find.

I'm going to order the MSI K8T Master2-FAR (dual opteron, onboard lan, agp,
4xpci) today, which is currently the cheapest dual cpu board.

	Arnd <><