Thinking of trying out Linux...

[drag]

Definately, VIA makes good chipsets.

Problem is that there are a few shady companies that sell them, so they got a bad reputation for a while to a lot of people.

Also some things get reputations they don't deserve. For example I have a ancient little motherboard, Sis K5s7a.
Places like Anandtech and Tomshardware reviewed it, and it was very fast due to it's one chip combined north/south bridge design, and it was very inexpensive. It was faster then motherboards that cost 2 times to 3 times as much.

So lots of people bought it and tried to overclock with it. Of course this failed miserably for the most part because the board was designed as a low-price fuddy-duddy desktop machine, so people burned out a lot of them and got them unstable with busted caps and worn out componates. So they got the reputation for being peices of crap.

Some Via-based boards are crap, others are great enterprise level boards with great stability and performance. It's up to the manufacturer of the motherboard.

Oh, that and if you buy a AMD64 machine, be sure to buy memory approved by the manufacturer of the motherboard. AMD64 machines are very sensitive to memory types aparently.


Then you have Nvidia. Nvidia has successfully leveraged it's marketing clout from it's video cards to gain a significant foothold in the enthusienst market. They have considurable amounts of technology in their drivers and it tricks Windows users into thinking they have something wonderfull... However under Linux it's a different story.

Nvidia soundstorm! Pretty cool stuff, right? People singing it's praises, right? WELL you know that it realy is a slightly engineered cheapo Intel8x0 derived design, right? The cheapest of the cheap audio chipsets! It doesn't even support hardware mixing like the cheapo Creative Soundblaster 5.1 live. If you want more then one sound source you have to setup software mixing plugins thru Alsa's Dmix plugin.

Also the onboard nic is pretty nice, right? Well know, that's a Realtek-derived design. Cheapest of the cheap nic cards. I bought several realtek-based cards under different manufactures for stuff like "buy 2 get one free" specials were each card costs 8 bucks. Now these cards are cheap, but they work perfectly under Linux.

Realtek actually does a very good job on supporting linux, one of the better companies out their. Free drivers when they can manage it. However Nvidia changed it around just enough that Linux drivers recongnized it as a realtek card, but when they load they won't work becuase of the differences.

Now Nvidia makes decent enough motherboards, usually good quality when compared to Via boards aviable at the same price range, but they aren't all that.

The only real advantage that Nvidia boards have is the video card is fairly fast. A Geforce4 MX440 or whatever they are called. Of course it's not a real Geforce4, it's actually a Geforce2 that has been warmed over to be much faster then it's ancesters and much cooler.

This is nice compared to Via's unichrome or Intel's Extreme 3d stuff, which you find on their low-budget onboard video setups. Those designes were designed for ebedded low power and general use setups and those companies don't have the resources devoted to making video cards like Nvidia does.

The only difference besides that would be that Nvidia is fairly hostile torwards Linux. They have closed source drivers, the refuse to help developers design drivers for otherwise generic hardware. Via and Intel do on occasion (but not always) provide their own open source reference drivers that the kernel guys fix up and get running well.

One of the major differences is that Linux is very commonly used in the server market. Via and Intel have lots of stuff in servers, especially Via now that Opteron has been catching on. Linux has about 12-17% or so of the market in server shipments, about 20% or so of OS sails, and probably a overall 25-30% of servers run Linux or other Open source/Free software operating systems. (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc)

So since that motherboard stuff gets used in lots of servers gets used in lots of desktops, then Intel and Via (and AMD I guess) have good reason to support Linux well.

At least that's how I see it. (lots of guessing and innacurracies to be sure)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: yelo333

Being prepared for something is a good thing, whether it will happen or not. How did Slackware install on that system? Or Debian stable? Or RedHat ES?

Slackware installed fine. As did gentoo. And debian stable. Let's not forget RH 7.3, RH 9, FC1, Suse 9.0, 9.1...Rest assured, I've installed my share of distro's on this box .

Good to hear. Last time I checked, some distros wouldn't install properly.

I personally wouldn't trust it, and would never compare anything that is supposed to be as good as nVidia's ethernet (Anandtech benchmarks made it look pretty damn yummy ) to a realtek card.

Not quite sure what you mean by this...you saying the realtek is just too horrible card to try to compare anything with it?

That is precisely what I'm saying. Between 3com and realtek, the crap NIC market is pretty much wrapped up.

I've read about issues on OpenBSD with various parts, including the IDE system. I don't trust it.

Can't comment here, as I don't run any of the *BSD's...Would you care to provide a few links?

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com

I'll let my few year old VIA based motherboards know that. They'll be sad to hear as they chug away doing what they do best.

What about their early sckt A chipsets? they had horrible issues...sure, they will come out with a good chipset every once in awhile. My #2 issue is the number of times I've seen fixes for VIA-only issues in various changelogs for programs...also, I've noticed that during heavy loads, VIA-based mobo's seem to lose some of the precision with the mouse on the ps/2 port. hard to describe, but, I can just "tell" when I sit down at a computer with one of those "affected" motherboards.


What about their latest chipsets?

My #1 problem I've seen only on VIA motherboards: IRQ assignments. Just try filling up all your slots with PCI cards...Most of the time, only one or two configurations of which card goes in which slot works...This is usually not the case with motherboards with competing chipsets.

If I get a chance, I'll try it. I'm not sure why I would want to fill them up though. I probably have enough PCI cards lying around to fill up the year or so old computer I've got sitting on the desk here.

I'd better come out of my generalization-cloud, and state specifics:

I've dealt with 3 VIA-based motherboards, 2 with K6'es, and 1 with a pentium II. All of them had this issue.

Also of note, a VIA-based dell has usb issues...

I've also dealt with an intel-based mobo, an sis-based mobo, and my current nforce2-based mobo. None of them have this issue.

I have had few issues with any of my machines. The worst being two crap boards I bought. 1 was a great deal, and I considered it "free" with 2 processors, and the other was free AR.

I use (at home): AMD, VIA, Serverworks, and Intel.

Why not buy nVidia? Because they don't support F/OSS. Because they are openly hostile to the community. Because I cannot trust them. It's the same reason I avoid Intel. Intel opens up a hell of a lot more than nVidia though. At the moment nVidia is letting Linux users suck off their teat of mediocrity, when all they have to do is give up a bit of documentation.

OK, I'm not a dev, can't comment here. It's very possible you are right.

I'm not a dev either, but I pay attention.

If I look at the list of supported NICs on the OpenBSD HCL, I can find just about every major vendor out there. Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, Realtek, whoever is making Linksys's ethernet chipsets these days, etc. But where is nVidia? Ethernet is nothing. Everyone and their grandmother has their own chipset, and they're fairly open (to varying degrees). Intel writes open source drivers (BSD licensed drivers for FreeBSD, and maybe GPL for Linux(?)). Where are the open source drivers from nVidia? Where is the documentation?

OK, don't have enough experience to comment intelligently here...thing is, though, my particular motherboard(and ones with specs close to it) seem to have a high degree of support in-kernel, which would mean open source, reverse-engineered or not...

One thing, though, what about VIA? do they provide the required info for people to make FOSS drivers?

Yes, VIA provides enough documentation to get things working.

I understand they have tech in their video cards that they cannot release. Fine, they write excellent 2D drivers for X11 (I'm using it right now in fact). I can deal with a closed source 3d driver for the most part (although I would encourage them to do better in the future). But that makes absolutely no sense for ethernet, IDE, etc. Screw them.

I've been using AMD chipsets since I got my first Athlon 550 (I think the 600s or the 650s were the latest at the time, so I got on the bandwagon pretty damned early). As you may know one of the parts of the chipset (south bridge?) is provided by VIA. The boards have been serving me pretty well, lasting quite a while. I've gotten several VIA only boards since I started making computers. 2 of them were trash, but that was my fault for not researching those particular boards better. The machine I'm typing this on is a VIA based machine. It's been pretty damned stable, and I couldn't ask for much more.

I've never used AMD chipsets. The two chipsets I was comparing were the socket A VIA+nforce chipsets. IIRC, when I bought my setup(almost exactly a year ago), the AMD chipsets were outdated, and were not used by the major manufactures, and so I never even considered them. can't comment here.

The AMD chipsets haven't been the fastest, but they've been quite stable and AMD gives a LOT of support to the F/OSS community.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
Also the onboard nic is pretty nice, right? Well know, that's a Realtek-derived design. Cheapest of the cheap nic cards. I bought several realtek-based cards under different manufactures for stuff like "buy 2 get one free" specials were each card costs 8 bucks. Now these cards are cheap, but they work perfectly under Linux.

Realtek actually does a very good job on supporting linux, one of the better companies out their. Free drivers when they can manage it. However Nvidia changed it around just enough that Linux drivers recongnized it as a realtek card, but when they load they won't work becuase of the differences.

I think the nForce 2 and later boards use a different chipset for the NIC. In the benchmarks on Anandtech they did QUITE well in the basic comparisons.

Not positive though.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
Also the onboard nic is pretty nice, right? Well know, that's a Realtek-derived design. Cheapest of the cheap nic cards. I bought several realtek-based cards under different manufactures for stuff like "buy 2 get one free" specials were each card costs 8 bucks. Now these cards are cheap, but they work perfectly under Linux.

Realtek actually does a very good job on supporting linux, one of the better companies out their. Free drivers when they can manage it. However Nvidia changed it around just enough that Linux drivers recongnized it as a realtek card, but when they load they won't work becuase of the differences.

I think the nForce 2 and later boards use a different chipset for the NIC. In the benchmarks on Anandtech they did QUITE well in the basic comparisons.

Not positive though.

Your probably right.