[ILUG] Re: A-Bit board

[John P . Looney]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2000 at 06:57:56PM +0000, Damian O'Sullivan mentioned:
> Skynet was thinking of upgrading to a dual celeron with the AbitP6 board.
> Have you had any probs with it? I saw the post today and was a bit miffed.

 Many. Having a root partition on HDE (the UDMA66 channel) is a bit
awkward. If anything dodgy happens, you have to swap the thing over to the
HDA channel, as standard kernels, like on a rescue disk or a boot CDROM
don't support it. You are supposed to be able to just add
"IDE2=0xd800,0xdc00" to the lilo line, but it doesn't always work.

 I've had a lot of lockups - it can happen say if your machine is in X
screensaver, and then runs updatedb. Machine hard-hangs. If I run
ApacheBench, on anything with php stuff in it, it'll hard-hang. Of course,
for a minute, it'll just have really crappy performance, and then hard
hang. Such frequent hard-hangs mean that files go walky every so often.
Monday evening was one such event. The inode in question was belonging to
/lib. I swear that didn't have an effect on my mood.

 I can't get nVidia's 3D drivers working with it. When I run anything, the
X server goes to 100%, and I've to telnet in & kill it remotely.

 It's a nice board, and cheap, with loads of cool features. It's nice to
be able to have

    export MAKE="make -j2"
    alias make='/usr/bin/make -j2'

 in my .bashrc & have it go double speed at makes...but if you need
reliablity, and often highly-stress your machine, this is not the board
you are looking for.

 Had I known what I know now about the board...I'd have bought it again. I
wanted a cheap board, to see me out till the Athlon/PIII fight is over,
and hardware gets really cheap & fast. It'll still play 3D games in single
CPU (windows 98) mode, but I was looking forward to Quake3 on my TNT with
SMP.

 Now, it's 800Mhz of Celeron for £220 (board&CPUs, inc VAT). But it's not
reliable. I've un-overclocked the CPUs, and the RAM, and gotten annoyed
with not having support for the HPT366 on standard boot disks, and stuck
the root disk alone, on the primary disk controller. And it's still
crashed. Skynet needs a rock-solid machine. Not a flaky hot-rod board.

Kate

-- 
Microsoft. The best reason in the world to drink beer.
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~valen