Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 19:05:55 -0400 From: Ted Sikora <tsikora@home.com> To: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@math.missouri.edu> Cc: "freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: New Motherboard and ATA Questions Message-ID: <38F50153.366CEE6D@home.com> References: <38F4E34E.7509861B@math.missouri.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote: > > I was thinking about buying myself an EPOX EP-7KXA motherboard > with the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset. But I read that VIA Apollo > chipsets have some problems with FreeBSD 4.0. > > Does anyone have any experience with this particular chipset? > > Does it depend upon the particular hard drives that I am using? > > I read that a solution is to add the lines > /sbin/sysctl -w hw.atamodes=pio,pio,pio,pio > to the beginning of rc. Does that mean that I will suffer > a performance loss in not being able to use the ATA66? > > I notice that there was a lot of talk about putting statements > about this in UPDATING, but I don't see anything there about it. > Also, wouldn't it be appropriate to say something about this in > the Errata? > I have the same board with an Athlon 550 running at 605Mhz with the FSB bumped up a bit. Absolutely stable. I replaced an FIC SD-11 with the EPOX. What a disaster(FIC) Now I realized if I had gotten a 350Watt PS that would have solved the FIC's problems. The EPOX like the FIC uses a VIA 686A south bridge for Ultra66. Actually in all my testing on other platforms and machines UDMA33 usually runs faster and more reliable than the UDMA66 mode. I have it on 5.0-current at UDMA33 with a Maxtor 5120 Plus HD. Average times are about 20.53 MB/sec not too shabby in my book. In UDMA66 mode the drive usually benchmarks slower. This was verified under Linux also. So you are definitely not missing any performance. Most of the tests at Anandtech and the likes have had similar findings also. A footnote if max performance is what you are after stick with Maxtor or IBM drives. They consistantly top the charts in benchmarking, noise and reliability. Of cource SCSI is another matter. -- Ted Sikora Jtl Development Group tsikora@powerusersbbs.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?38F50153.366CEE6D>