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Date:      Fri, 10 May 1996 12:59:43 -0700 (PDT)
From:      "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com>
To:        dave@persprog.com (David Alderman)
Cc:        smatthew@ccnet.com, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Motherboards
Message-ID:  <199605101959.MAA07941@GndRsh.aac.dev.com>
In-Reply-To: <2287D9F65F4@novell.persprog.com> from David Alderman at "May 10, 96 09:56:17 am"

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> 
> > I'm looking to build a Pentium system to run FreeBSD. I'm looking for a
> > good quality motherboard that can do parity on the memory, and is PCI. What
> > are you using? What would you reccomend? Thanks for helping a FreeBSD
> > newbie.
> > Thanks
> > 
> > Scott
> I would recommend ASUS boards in general.  They have a fairly good 
> track record.  To get parity, you will need either a Triton II or a 
> Neptune board (the Triton II is the newer chipset).  Does anybody 
> have a Triton II (82430HX) board working with FreeBSD?

I have qualified the ASUS PCI/I-P55T2P4 board and am shipping product
at this time.

> I seem to remember some problem with it, but that it may have been fixed a 
> couple of weeks ago?

Your the second person who has mentioned this, pointers to more specific
details are needed.  I have not seen any ``problems'' that can be attributed
to the MB.

> Also if anyone has a list of boards in general that support parity or
> (egad!) ECC, it might be nice to post it here. 

The Triton II chipset supports ECC, and yes, the PCI/I-P55T2P4 allows you
to run in either Parity mode or ECC mode if you are using x36 true parity
(not the logic parity generator chip) memory.  Note that running in ECC
mode slows you down about 10 to 15%.   The PCI/I-P55T2P4 board running in
ECC mode is about the same speed as the PCI/I-P55TP4N, it is about 10 to
15% faster when running in either Parity mode with x36 parts or non-parity
mode with 32 bit parts.

> I have a problem with making servers that have no provision for 
> detecting even simple single bit errors.

My FCS on this product has already turned up the fact that he had bad
memory.  2 Crashes directly reported as NMI parity errors, numorous other
crashes caused be assertion of SERR during PCI bus mastering (Ungraceful
crashes, but at least it allowed me to quickly diagnose the problem as more
memory related failures).


-- 
Rod Grimes                                      rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Accurate Automation Company                 Reliable computers for FreeBSD



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