[NTLUG:Discuss] (somewhat OT) AMD mobo/chipset recommendations?

[Darin W. Smith]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:23:37 -0500, Paul Drew <solarcurve at msn.com> wrote:

> Howdy,
> I am an AMD guy myself, and I have been using Soyo products for a few 
> years now. I am VERY VERY happy with my Dragon boards. I have an older 
> Dragon Plus! board which is 266mhz fsb. The newest version they sell has 
> everything you are looking for including the onboard raid. I have had 0 
> issues installing Mandrake, and Redhat on them including messing around 
> with the raid functions with no issues encountered.
>

Good call.  The Dragon Ultra fits my needs well.  I see their website says 
it has four
IDE channels, but I saw no mention of RAID.  I'm mainly just interested in 
mirroring, since drives
are so cheap.  I could do that through software RAID (and have done it 
before), but I
was thinking if it had hardware, then the kernel would only have to send 
the data out to the bus once.

It looks like their serial ATA support is in the form of a parallel to 
serial riser card that
comes out of the regular IDE connector.  I wonder if that supports more 
than two devices on a channel?

This uses the KT400 chipset.  Is that one any better at I/O than the older 
VIA chipsets?  I think my
current board has a KT333 chipset, and it had terrible problems ripping 
audio CD's.  It just couldn't do
it without inserting LOTS of jitter.  Popping in a PCI CMD640-based card to 
run my CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives
was the only way I could do it.  I do like to archive my music CDs as Ogg- 
Vorbis.

It looks like with this one that I could go all the way up to an Athlon XP 
3000+ if I wanted.

This one will definitely be on my short list.

-- 
D!
Darin W. Smith
AIM: JediGrover
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite 
you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." --Mark 
Twain "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"