[mythtv-users] which of these motherboards should I buy? (socket 754)

arctic3 arctic3 at pacbell.net
Tue Jan 2 22:57:59 UTC 2007


I sure could use some help from the pros on selecting which mobo to buy.

This weekend, my trusty Asus Socket A motherboard gave up the ghost (capacitors) so I'm going to replace her with a cheap socket 754 mobo for now. Then will go to AM2 down the road.

I'm choosing socket 754 because I couldn't find any s939 mobos that fit my criteria:
Asus or MSI
ATX not mATX
3+ PCI slots (2 PVR 150s and a possible 3rd card)
Fanless chipset

And not AM2 because, I did a little research on the AM2 chipsets but they still seem not mature enough for a linux non-guru such as myself. Seems like I see a lot of issues still.


So, with that said, which of these 3 socket 754 boards would you recommend as best for my setup?

-Myth 0.20 running on Fedora Core 5
-Combined FE/BE
-MSI NVidia FX5200 AGP w/ S-video out
-SD TV viewing/recording. No HD planned.
-250 GB WD Caviar IDE HDD
-512MB RAM


Choice #1: ASUS K8V-X SE (VIA K8T800  chipset; 3COM integrated NIC)
 http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=14&l3=67&model=790&modelmenu=2
 
Choice #2: ASUS K8N (nForce3 250 chipset; Marvell integrated NIC)
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=14&l3=66&model=233&modelmenu=2

Choice #3: ASUS K8N-E (nForce3 250 chipset; Marvell integrated NIC). Not sure what the -E means.
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=14&l3=66&model=772&modelmenu=2

Question re VIA versus Nvidia chipset:
I keep reading how there are issues between ivtv and VIA chipsets, but the various pages I found which list the conflicting VIA chipsets do not match the K8T800. Otherwise I would go with the nVidia chipset mobos.
The other reason for choice #1 is:  Choices #2/3 have *Marvell* integrated NICs. IIRC, there were issues with Fedora not seeing these during setup, so you had to pop in a PCI NIC until you could do a yum update?


Thanks for the help...   I've been sitting on this decision for 2 days now (after doing 1 week of research online, searching, reading old posts, etc.)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20070102/b269c2f7/attachment.htm 


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list