On 31 December 2005 at 2:04, Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote: I opted for an ABIT AV8-3rd Eye motherboard: Athlon 64 or 64FX, 1GHz FSB, SATA, RAID, AGP8X, 1x IEEE1394, Gb LAN, 4x USB2, North bridge VIA K8T800 Pro, South bridge VIA VT8237, AC97 Codec 6ch audio. I put an Athlon 64-X2 4200+ (2.2GHz) and 2/ea Kingston 512MB DDR400 (PC3200) memory sticks in the board. My ATI Radeon 9250 AGP Video has been a bit of a source of trouble. If I stay away from all of the ATI specific (Xorg or ATI proprietary) drivers, then things seem to be OK. This is with Xorg 6.9, which I guess has been problematic in this area and with Nvidia cards as well. Looks like a pretty good board, but I don't have any experience at all with one. Please post your success story for those that follow you into 64-X2 territory. Cheers.... -- Kevin

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Lee Revell wrote: Hi Lee and group, So did you ever get your new system? I can see you're not a big fan of NVidia, but I thought I'd play a little devil's advocate here. I put together a new AMD X2 system a few weeks ago with a Tyan motherboard, NVidia CK804 (nforce4) chipset, http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tomcatk8e.html Its rock solid so far (bleeding edge Gentoo, vanilla 2.6.14), and all the devices I care about are supported. Here's my lspci output, with my comments in []'s, 00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev a3) [ basic stuff, no problem ] 00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2) [ haven't tried this yet ] 00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2) 00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3) [ works fine ] 00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2) [ driven by snd_intel8x0, despite the driver name ] 00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2) [ works fine, I have a Seagate drive ] 00:07.0 RAID bus controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3) 00:08.0 RAID bus controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3) [ haven't tried, don't have an SATA drive, might not be supported ] 00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev a2) 00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3) [ drivers/net/forcedeth.c ] 00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3) 00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3) 00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3) 00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control [ nothing here that I need to bother with ] 01:05.0 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27) [ old chip, probably supported by Mach64 DRI for basic 3D ] 01:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) [ haven't tried this yet, but it looks like bog-standard VIA OHCI ] 01:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. ICE1712 [Envy24] PCI Multi-Channel I/O Controller (rev 02) [ Delta 66, works fine ] 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11) [ yucky proprietary driver available, but I don't use this port, the above forcedeth-driven port is enough ] 05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM) (rev a1) [ I added this, forgive me :) ] I had looked at all the others, and bought Tyan based on its reputation for stability, and mixed customer reviews of other makers (DOAs and returns). I plan to run this thing for at least 5 years. I respect your reasons for avoiding the NVidia 3D driver, but I overall the CK804 chipset isn't bad (notable exception being SATA if that doesn't work). Only hiccup was that I had to do a BIOS upgrade before it would recognize both cores of the X2 processor, and it was a little confused about how much memory I had at first (saw 16MB instead of 2GB), but I got it sorted out. I bought all the parts from newegg, including this solid/cheap case, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811119047 -Jamie p.s. I don't work for NVidia. In fact, I have several close friends who work at ATI (shhh...).