From owner-freebsd-hardware Tue Mar 26 17:10:50 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id RAA22002 for hardware-outgoing; Tue, 26 Mar 1996 17:10:50 -0800 (PST) Received: from saguaro.flyingfox.com (saguaro.flyingfox.com [204.188.109.253]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA21979 for ; Tue, 26 Mar 1996 17:10:45 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jas@localhost) by saguaro.flyingfox.com (8.6.12/8.6.10) id RAA19327 for hardware@freebsd.org; Tue, 26 Mar 1996 17:07:47 -0800 Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 17:07:47 -0800 From: Jim Shankland Message-Id: <199603270107.RAA19327@saguaro.flyingfox.com> To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: motherboard and Ethernet card recommendations Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I hope this is not so frequently asked a question that I'm being annoying, but I would appreciate any words of wisdom regarding Pentium motherboard and Ethernet card selection for a FreeBSD machine. The criteria for the motherboard are: * rock solid stable; * no buggy chipsets or goofy cache coherency problems; * no weird hardware limitations. The criteria for the Ethernet card are: * rock solid stable; * excellent performance (should be able to keep up with basically a full-speed Ethernet packet stream); * excellent, very stable FreeBSD device driver. A secondary goal is to have a non-brain-damaged BIOS that can be configured so that the machine will boot without a keyboard, and ideally without a graphics card. Note that cost is *not* a primary concern, though of course I'm not intent on spending any money I don't need to. I'd be happy to take responses by email, and summarize to the list, if that's appropriate. Thanks in advance. Jim Shankland Flying Fox Computer Systems, Inc.