Rick Meyer wrote: > Some of the Manufacturers I > have looked at include ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and DFI. then, later: > Reliability and stability of the main board is critical. Looks like you're looking at the right sort of brands, then. > I have had some not so nice experiences with > the SIS chipsets How long ago was that? It's my experience that some of the chipsets they were selling about five years ago, for the AMD K6-2, were *very* bad. Since then, they seem to have got better (it would have been difficult to have done otherwise and stayed in business). > - so are the NVIDIA chipsets better for Fedora? Or is a > different chipset the way to go? As you've found, both chipset and motherboard manufacturers are important (and, in my experience, the two biggest factors in the stability of the system). Nvidia have a good reputation: Via also seem to be pretty good. Intel, at least as a chipset manufacturer, has a very good reputation. Most chipsets sold seem to come from one of these three manufacturers: ATi seem to have a larger market share of the Intel CPU chipset market than the AMD one. This is more important for ongoing compatibility than anything else. > I think manufactures should release some > MTBF rates for the motherboards. One can estimate MTBF rates for something like hard drives, which will have one of two or three basic access pattens. But motherboards can be used and abused in so many slightly different ways that the only way that you can find out the MTBF with any accuracy is to actually wait until a fair proportion of the motherboards fail (which should mean at least five years). Details like the manufacturer of the capacitors and the way the motherboard is mounted can make a big difference. > Also I have come across the NVIDIA SLI > certification. It sounds close to what I want when I purchase a bunch of > motherboards. Hmm. SLI implies PCI Express. I've got a new and very nice Athlon 64 PCI Express system for personal use, and I'm very pleased with it, but I think it's still a little new for a super stable system. On the other hand, if you're expecting to keep the systems and upgrade them, PCI Express will give you more flexibility in the future. You might find it worth looking at some of the overclocking features: stuff like extra cooling of capacitors and better power distribution helps motherboard stability even at normal speeds. Hope this helps, James. -- James Wilkinson | "Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating Exeter Devon UK | gun. And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates. E-mail address: james | (pulls trigger) Well, what you do know, @westexe.demon.co.uk | it disintegrated." -- Daffy Duck
