Guest rollingrock Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 I'm thinking of upgrading my pitiful athlon 600 system to a barton athlon xp 2600 on an nforce2 based board. Am I in for a painful experience? How good are the current drivers for video/sound/etc? If this is a bad idea does anyone have any other suggestions for an alternative? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 A bit of annoyance (downloading the linux nforce driver and have it handy in a disk or something, since without it, you cannot access the internet), a bit of tweaking (putting ide0=ata66 and ide1=ata66 in lilo to get udma 5 and above), a little bit of disappointment (the sound drivers can only process 1 channel of sound at a time right now, so no 5 speakers setup), but no, nothing painful. Just like any new platform in linux actually. I suggest you get away from epox in this case however, and go to something like abit. Epox is a beast of an overclocker motherboard but until they fix the bios, you cannot run X with nvidia driver with newer bios. But other than that.. nforce2 seems to be a nice, stable motherboard in linux, just remember that it is a new platform, so it is not supported totally. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chef_kunal Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 Athlon xps are at the end of their life. If you cant wait a year for athlon 64 or opteron on the nforce 3 motherboard then buy a 1700 thouroughbred athlon xp that you can easily overclock to 2200 mhz = about 2600+ PR. Unless you really cant wait, that is if its impossible to work on your system anymore. If you wait, then all even the normal athlon XP will be much cheaper. Processor power is such a waste these days---- unless youre into cad or 3d or video editing or running a database server. If your games are slow then invest in a good graphics card and a KT400A motherboard that supports 400 mhz FSb. Athlons start to lose bang for the buck once you cross 2400 MHZ or so. Thats because AMD is stretching its PR rating sytem too far now. Just my opinion. Regards Kunal Kumar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 I agree. I recommend a kt400 chipset. The Nvidia chipsets are just too new. Linux has no set up trouble with the kt400 boards. I have an 1800xp which is plenty of toy to play with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rollingrock Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 hmm yeah I was thinking about waiting for an athlon 64 but I'm getting antsy although the one channel of sound thing sounds pretty dissappointing. But even then the nforce3 will be the new platform and have the same probs that the nforce2 does now. Maybe I'll just get the kt400a & overclock... Thanks for the help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted May 7, 2003 Report Share Posted May 7, 2003 Note that from what I heard of KT400A motherboard, none of them support pci fsb lock, so you have to be careful in overclocking your motherboard if the correct fsb/pci divider is not there. Other than that.. good luck in choosing your motherboard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kormac Posted May 8, 2003 Report Share Posted May 8, 2003 I've just upgraded to a system with an ABIT NF7-S (2.0) motherboard and a Athlon XP2100+. It's completely stable so far, but there are a couple of issues due to the chipset being so new. There's a bug in the current Mandrake kernel (and all kernels previous to 2.4.21pre5) which locks IDE to udma2 mode. This has already been solved though, and the next version of the multimedia kernel is likely to fix it (appearing on MandrakeClub). Sound works fine for me, with much better quality than my old SBLive, but I only have a two-speaker system. I haven't tried connecting firewire peripherals, but hear it is not supported out of the box yet. As for USB, that definitely works (Though I've only tested with USB 1.1 devices). I use a separate network card, but know that the included one is supposed to work well. As for AGP, it is only supported with NvAGP, and not AGPGART. Which means that you will only get AGP support with nVIDIA cards (others will be treated as PCI). nVIDIA have promised to rectify this with their upcoming drivers. All in all it is very fast and completely stable here. All the issues are likely to be solved shortly, as they are due to the newness of the chipset. /me recommends it :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rollingrock Posted May 9, 2003 Report Share Posted May 9, 2003 As for AGP, it is only supported with NvAGP, and not AGPGART whew glad you told me that, I was this close to getting a radeon & an nforce2 based board. That would have been badness. I'm not sure how much I trust nvidia's promise to support ATI's cards. Maybe I'll wait this out a bit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest DarkB Posted May 15, 2003 Report Share Posted May 15, 2003 I've got a radeon 9500 pro on a nforce2 based motherboard (leadtek k7ncr18d).. With the expection of my network card not functioning properly (still havent managed to figure the damn thing out), its running pretty much ok... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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