AMD Cleaning Intel's Clocks 6722

On Wednesday 07 December 2005 19:16, Erik Funkenbusch stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

We don't always have to disagree, Erik. Every once in a while, we can take a coffee break. ;-)

What I like about thenForceconcept is that there is no separate South Bridge. Everything is more integrated. This is far more efficient than the traditional North Bridge to South Bridge set-up.

Well, if I decide to go for an AMD64 solution, I will consider Gigabyte motherboards - I will typically go for server boards or high-end workstation boards for quality and durability reasons; I don't like "commodity PC" components much.

Sadly enough, I've just bought a GeCube Radeon 9250 PCI card - as my Intel SE7500CW motherboard lacks an AGP slot - so PCIe would leave me with a useless video card.

I prefer SCSI myself over any ATA. What's "NCQ", by the way?

Well, I originally also felt that a motherboard should have as many peripherals on board as I would need, but I've learned from experience that a plug-in PCI(-X) adapter is often more featurefull than an on-board adapter.

My previous machine was a dual AMD Athlon MP on a Tyan motherboard. It used the AMD760 chipset. That machine was utter crap, but I blame Tyan for that, and Tyan blames AMD. For some reason, that motherboard seemed to work well with two Athlon XP CPU's, but AMD didn't support the Athlon XP in SMP set-ups.

With the recommended Athlon MP's, that machine crashed 10 times in one hour, 8 times of which in the first 30 minutes. :-

Turned out that nobody could get that motherboard to work with dual Athlon MP's, and they've tried with various new motherboards and CPU sets, and the latest BIOS revisions.

Eventually, that's how I ended up with this machine here, which is all Intel - SE7500CW motherboard, dual Xeon 2.2 GHz-400 MHz FSB with HyperThreading.

The only Intel machine I've ever had problems with was my Pentium II. It had a Chaintech motherboard and a Fujitsu IDE hard disk which needed replacement already six months after the purchase. It was slow as hell too. ;-)

Well, I've had problems with my Pentium III machine as well, but that was because it got hit by a lightning surge through the cable modem. It still lasted about a year before it croaked, but it was never stable again after that surge.

My current machine is also starting to get unstable. I actually had a full lock-up twice on Saturday night, but it's most likely caused by my videocard, which is also about to croak.

Every once in a while - and this happened on Saturday as well, five minutes after the first crash - it just goes blank on me - either an opaque white, black or a solid other color - and then all I can do is blindly shut down the machine via my root terminal window.

I keep this root console window on my last virtual desktop, and I've set up my keyboard so that I can switch to that desktop immediately by pressing *Ctrl+F12.* Then all I have to do is type...

reboot

... and I'm back in business.

This videocard has been bugging me for ages. I'm really going to have to upgrade this machine one of these days, and clean out the case in the process. I'm a smoker and that case also has two intake fans which act like dustbusters.

I think I'm going to be baffled seeing what's inside that box once I'll have it opened. ;-) -- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)