On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 14:54:05 -0600
Christopher Bottaro <cbottaro(a)geocenter.com> wrote:
On Mar 14, 2004, at 1:41 AM, Randy Kelsoe wrote:
> I am using the GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 MB, which uses the Nvidia
> nforce2 chipset. I'm not using any of the Nvidia drivers. This mobo
> uses the RealTek 8169 onboard gigabit lan, and not the nforce2 lan.
> I tried using the Nvidia drivers for the onboard sound, and they had
>
> problems. Anaconda selected the intel8x0 driver for the onboard
> video, and that works much better than the Nvidia driver. This mobo
> has worked well with RH9 (but needed a later kernel), and has worked
> well with FC1 right out of the box. It's almost twice the price of
> the GA-7VT600-L, but it has SATA, RAID, and Dual Channel memory. I'm
> not using the RAID, but SATA works (though not at full speed yet),
> and dual channel memory is about 50% faster than single channel
> mode. There is also a cheaper model that does not have the RAID and
> SATA, and has a 100base T NIC.
excuse my naivety, but is dual channel memory and hardware raid OS
transparent?
dual-channel RAM, yes. Hardware RAID, no -- you will need to tweak your
kernel for that.
i'm looking to build a new computer also. i can't decide if
its going
to be a windows box (for games) or a linux system. if i can afford
it, i want SATA, RAID 0, and dual channel memory. if the hardware
RAID is transparent to the OS, i'd rather do that.
Well, you can have both (a dual boot system), that's what I have here. I
have a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, which has dual-channel mem and onboard SATA
RAID. I personally don't use SATA RAID yet, but I've read reports on
this list of people using it successfully.
a couple of questions.
1) how do i know if dual channel memory is working? is it OS
transparent, or do i need to install drivers?
In my case, BIOS prints useful diagnostics during boot.
2) "but SATA works (though not at full speed yet)", how do
you know
what speed its working at?
hdparm -T /dev/hdX
hdparm -t /dev/hdX
3) how do you know if you got the RAID setup properly?
Can't help you with this, sorry.
btw, i heard nforce2 has issues with linux:
http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/
opinions?
My mobo uses this chipset. Network can only be achieved with NVidia
drivers, but works well (there is a reverse-engineered GPL driver in the
wild, but it is still beta AFAIK). ALSA supports nforce2 just
fine (actually better than NVidia).
HTH
Andre
--
Andre Oliveira da Costa