Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:26:39 -0500 From: "Ian D. Leroux" <idleroux@MIT.EDU> To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Motherboard and Video Card selection Message-ID: <20060130192639.in25nckcus80c8ww@webmail.mit.edu>
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Good (insert local time of day here), I'm currently putting together the parts list for my next desktop, and am planning to make it an athlon64 X2 (socket 939) system. My current computer has lasted me 5-6 years, and for 4 of those it ran FreeBSD. Consequently, I'm hoping to build something reasonably up-to-date (so it won't be obsolete too soon), but well-supported by FreeBSD (so I won't have to change my operating system). After perusing the motherboards list and googling about, it would seem that I have two options for FreeBSD-supported motherboard/graphics card combinations: 1- VIA K8T800 (e.g. Asus A8V): This seems to be mature and well-supported, but the combination of this chipset, (some) ATI Radeon cards, and SMP seems to cause problems, so I'd have to use an nVidia card. 2- NVIDIA nForce 4 (e.g. ASUS A8N5X): This is reported to be mostly-supported under 6.0, albeit using a binary driver for the network interface,and would (ironically) let me use an ATI video card. I'm not really satisfied with either option. I'm not a gamer, but I'd like my graphics card to at least work properly, including 3D, particularly since desktop software is reportedly moving towards the use of 3D extensions for rendering (e.g. cairo). For NVIDIA cards, this requires binary-only drivers that are currently unavailable for 64-bit FreeBSD. ATI cards up to the Radeon 9250 seem to have mature open-source drivers, and r300 series (Radeon 9550-9800 or so) have reverse-engineered drivers that are "almost there" (http://r300.sourceforge.net, they're also in ports somewhere), but as already mentioned they don't seem to work with the more stable and open-source friendly motherboards. Does anybody have any thoughts/comments/corrections/recommendations? Specifically: - Are there any radeon cards that have been known to work with dual-core athlons on k8t800-based boards? - Am I forgetting anybody? i.e. are any of the other motherboard chipsets (sis 965L, ati radeon crossfire) currently or soon-to-be supported? Ditto for video cards. - Are there any firms that FreeBSD developers have found particularly helpful (e.g. by releasing hardware specifications) and that I ought to support with my computer-buying funds? I don't much like NVIDIA's binary-drivers-only policy, but is anybody else out there any better? Again, the question applies to both motherboards and graphics cards. - Am I asking for the impossible? Should I just use an Intel CPU, another OS, or unsupported hardware for now and wait for the drivers to catch up? I don't think I have the skills or the time to contribute to driver development (though I'm tempted to try), so telling me to just make FreeBSD work on whatever I buy and contribute the changes back to the source tree wouldn't be terribly useful. Thank you very much for any and all comments, -- Ian Leroux
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