Re: Goodbye ASUS, Hello Gigabyte

On Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:56:31 UTC, "David T. Johnson"
<djohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
On 2009-09-24, David T. Johnson <djohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have not tested the onboard LAN or sound yet (since I'm using add-on
pci cards for those) but the Danis506.add v1.8.5 driver works fine with
the disk controller.

The SMP option does not work for two cores but otherwise works okay.

Do you mean it works for 4 cores, or what???

The motherboard, like the ASUS motherboard, will not boot properly
unless an smp kernel, smp doscall1.dll, and smp os2loadr are used.
If you do that, though, everything is fine.

Do you mean that UNI and W4 kernels/etc won't boot in single-processor
mode?

No, you have to use an SMP kernel and the SMP DOSCALL1.DLL. The Uni
kernel and W4 kernels will not boot.

=======================================================

BTW, I made a little research of what people say about this
motherboard. A lot of complaints come again and again. (But even
those who report problem mostly do not through it away.) The list:

---

Cons: The board had flux around the entire bottom outside edge and in
a few areas in the center of the board. This is because it was
processed in a water wash system and the wave pallet was not removed
prior to wash. Not good! Luckily I work in the industry and know how
to clean it.

About all it can say is that it looked like every other motherboard I've
ever used. I didn't see any flux residues or any other residues anywhere.

The ATX form factor is not ATX Form Factor. I know that it is not
uncommon, but it seems a bit ignorant to me for a board maker to
produce a board that has 9 mounting holes and only 6 are form factor
compliant. This board is an inch short of the ATX width front to rear
in a case.

This is correct, the board was a little shorter than the ASUS board was
and used 6 mounting holes instead of 9. I thought this was actually
good, in my case, because I couldn't use a longer DVD R/W optical drive
with the ASUS board in my case because the end of the drive hit the
memory modules on the ASUS board while on this one they didn't.

The North Bridge Chip cooler is a rather loose fit and easy to bump
around. I worry that it will loose contact hanging in the case.

Actually, it is not rigidly mounted but is mounted with two spring
assemblies. Again, I thought that was a little better than the rigid mount.


Only one fan header can be controlled. USB header is in terrible
place.

My board has two chassis fan plugs while the asus board had only one. I
don't know if both are controlled or not. I'm assuming that you mean
the AMD cool n quiet fan speed changing thing. I know the board
controls the cpu fan speed but I don't know about the chassis fans.
They each have little 3-spd switches on them and I have them set at the
'medium' speed and then I forgot about them. All has been well thus far.


Only supports DDR3 RAM

True. Again, I thought that was good. The ASUS board only supported
DDR2 ram. DDR3 is faster than DDR2 and OS/2 on the gigabyte board with
slightly faster memory actually was a little faster which suprised the
heck out of me.

- Seemed to have compatibility problems with my Lite-On LH-20A1H
DVD-RW drive; WinXP wouldn't recognize the drive. Had to swap to
another drive.

I'm using a Samsung DVD R/W drive which works okay.


Had to update to F2 bios to unlock 4th core. unlock "extra" cores
with ACC-Hybrid With Auto

Audio pops

I'm not using the onboard audio but I'll probably try it in the future
at some point.


Northbridge at 80 C

runs ram very hot as well

I don't know what the ram temperature is but it certainly is not 80C
just based on touch...maybe 30C?


12V and audio inputs are in tricky spots for cable management.

a long video card, it will block the IDE connector.

An occupied bottom PCI slot makes Floppy connector hard to reach

SATA connectors are below the PCI-E x16 slot. This means they'll have
to around, over, or under your video card.

My cables were all easy to route and nothing had to go over or under the
PCI-E video card. I plugged in all of the cables in all of the
appropriate spots in a few minutes including floppy, serial, and lpt
cables which probably not that many people use anymore. Everything
seemed to go okay.


The board was a little shorter (back to front) than my old board. This
makes it a little more crowded than needed (see above). I also had to
move the support posts to line up with the screw holes.

The board uses 6 mounting screws that lined up perfectly with the
forward six ATX slots in the case so I assume they must have met the ATX
standard for spacing and placement. The board is a little shorter but
it also doesn't have onboard video so the motherboard real estate
crowding seems about the same as the ASUS board.



I do not know the motherboard landscape of today. Is such amount of
technical compliants "normal"? (I mean would other choices be not
much better?)


I installed the board and booted it within 30 minutes and I have not
touched it since. That's all I need.

I would add that it sounds as if the heating problems are caused by
overclocking. All the other issues are non-issues or things that
would concern someone that has a show off glass sided case.

--
ivan
.

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