Motherboard Recommendations, and a hello...

[Dan Jenkins]

bmcculley at rcn.com wrote:

>That's good info.  One problem I had researching my component selections was that a lot of the product reviews are by enthusiast gamers, not necessarily relevent to open source.  For example I didn't see much one way or the other about MSI boards, Dan's comments about performance on them being a little less would make them uninteresting to the lan party crowd.  I did see some mentions of Linux on ASUS that didn't look scary to me, which helped confirm my choice, but comments such as Dan's would have been much appreciated.  As they are now.
>
>Thanks, Dan!
>
You're welcome.

We've been using Linux on our systems (and our clients) since 1995, so 
we've run through a lot of different motherboards and other hardware 
(and a few distributions) during that time. To summarize: most work 
pretty well; the built-ins are usually the problem. To be honest, we 
mainly use Linux for servers, so items like audio or high-end video 
simply are not important to us. Reliable network and disk I/O are very 
important. Stable systems are critical. Stability trumps performance 
most of the time for our clients. (Having said that, my business partner 
does overclock anything he touches for our purposes.) So, our preference 
for most motherboards (MSI over the last few years) is for stable ones, 
not overclockable ones. I strongly prefer natively supported devices, 
rather than having to compile drivers, (for ease of maintenance) so we 
choose equipment to fulfill that.  We do do performance equipment if 
clients want it for purposes like CAD, mathematical modeling or video 
production, but general purpose servers and workstations is what most of 
our clients want. So, our equipment choices go for boring, stable stuff.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for over a Quarter Century