Mageia forum

Not sure what forum this belongs in. My main problem is I have no idea what I need. I went to Newegg and was totally confused. My needs are simple. Mageia compatible. Home use only. Internet, Gimp, photos. I have a Galaxy Nvidia Geforce GT430 1GB DDR3 128bit graphics card. A WinTV-250 card . AMD|ATH IIX4 635 2.9G AM3 RT CPU. Memory is 2 sets of 2 1G cards with 240 pin. I am replacing a broken ASUS M4785TD-V board. I have no problem with buying a MB and CPU combo along with new memory. My major concern is mageia compatibility.
Thanks, Gary

Your cpu is more than enough power to run mageia.

Therefore instead of shelling out for a new intel based system

I would recomend a new am3 plus board.

Asus is my fav

You could go for one of there top boards but i would consider this a two year investment, and spend about

100 dollars on an asus amd 800 or 900 chipset board.

If you still struggling with that reply ask again and ill pick you one. As for memory you did not say whether the memory is ddr 2. if it is you may not be able to go for a am3plus unless you get new memory as well. If thats the case just look for a ddr2 board as the speed wont make a huge difference to linux, its such an efficient os anyway.

Still stick with asus.

Whatever you get it must have at least one pcie 16 and the version should be 2.0

Ps im running on a 990fx board and no probs with mageia1

You can never be sure a new rev wont break, but that can be fixed.

If old revs run on new hw, new ones should, excluding realy old......

Regards peter

Usually retail desktop MBs are not a problem for Linux (unlike laptop MBs or sometimes MBs in prebuilt systems), however, of course there may be rare exceptions. I'd recommend to buy a new MB for existing CPU, maybe not the "latest" model, but something which is already several years on the market. You may want also check buyers' feedback on the products on Newegg. As you might notice, there are some reports on video cards from Linux users (both positive and negative), but almost nothing on MBs as they cause problems really rarely.

I found this MB ASUS M4N98TD EVO AM3 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI ATX AMD Motherboard here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131636

This is the only one I found with a PATA/IDE connection. I need this for my backup HD.
I have DDR3 memory.

Would appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks,
Gary

I remember there was a kernel bug affecting PATA CD-drives (not sure about HDDs) in Mandriva and probably Mageia 1. Is it still there?

I had / have (now using with centos, as a server) the prev gen of this board the ASUS M3N-HT DLX MEMPIPE AM2+.

With mandriva it works almost perfectly, but the usb sound chip used to occasionally give me trouble (ADI AD1988B).

that was the 780a nvidia chipset, with ddr2 memory.

so i would guess this ones going to be an upgrade of that board.

this one does not have that sound chip instead it has VIA VT1708S.

so what we need to do is look at the generic status of linux and these components

this link here says something about it, but aslo suggests what i did , to go for the amd 800/900 chipset instead.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.p ... 14373.html

therefore without being able to test if i was picking from a store, i would be looking in the suggested price range at this.

ASUS M5A97 EVO AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

its not a 990FX like mine, but based on a slightly less featured 970 chipset, which drops the price to $114 instead of the $209 that the crosshair V formula is.

but its just as featured as the M4N98TD but does not have the PATA/IDE connection, although this can be fixed by buying one of these.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812232004 at only 11 dollars.

it has the following important components.

Realtek® 8111E , 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s) (i know this works with mga2 as its the same nic im testing on my jetway board.)

Realtek® ALC892 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC , not quite the alc889 of the crosshair, but i would suspect its close.

I cant promise either of these boards will work 100%, but as they share lots of similarities to hardware im using im pretty sure, you will have no trouble.

regards peter

Thank you both for your input. I will purchase the ASUS M5A97 and the IDE adapter. You have been extremely helpful.
Gary

Thank you Gary!!!