Failing hardware part 4

Yes, the ongoing saga of my hardware meltdown continues.

The Seasonic M12II-430W power supply I ordered finally arrived today, and oh man, is it nice. The modular cabling makes it so much easier to work inside my case, besides improving airflow since I need far fewer cables.

I threw in my RAID1 array and booted the machine up, and it ran just fine . . . for a half hour. And then it froze again. Went out to lunch and never came back.

So, since the PSU is good, the new graphics card is good (the old one is completely dead; it won't output at all), the drives are good, the outlet and power strip seem good . . . I guess the only suspect is the motherboard itself. It can't be software: I ran a few liveCDs that don't use x11-drivers/ati-drivers, and they all locked up at some point.

I thought about switching to Intel, given the excellent chipset support in Linux, but it's cheaper to just keep my existing Athlon X2 CPU, rather than buy a whole new motherboard and CPU.

I believe I'll purchase this board, the Asus M3A78-EM HDMI. Sure, it's microATX, but I only have a single dual-slot PCIe graphics card and a separate PCI sound card, so it's not like I need lots of expansion space. Another plus is that the board supports AHCI for drives, though I've read that there may be issues with AMD's AHCI implementation in SB700 chipsets. Reports are mixed, however, and there's next to no information for Linux users. Hopefully I can get it working; it'd be nice to finally use my Asus SATA DVDRW. It doesn't play nicely with sata_nv for nVidia MCP55 chipsets, so it's been gathering dust in the closet.

Any experiences ya'll have for this Asus board (or other good AMD chipsets for socket AM2/AM2+) would be appreciated.

* * *

What with all the hardware craziness, I've put myself on devaway; I don't know when I'll be able to really get any work done this month. Once I get my new hardware, assuming it works, I should be able to pick up Gentoo development where I left off.

I really don't know what I'll do if the motherboard doesn't solve the lockups. Weep quietly in a corner, perhaps. Swear off computers forever, maybe.

This entry was posted on October 15th, 2008 at 08:24:59 am and is filed under Gentoo, Hardware.

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7 comments

Comment from: Christoph Brill [Visitor]

I have 2 AMD X2 systems running with gentoo. The one at home is a cheap MSI board with an MCP55. Works really flawless.

At work I have some ASUS with SB700 ... which is a desaster. I can't upgrade my kernel beyond 2.6.25 or the system will just segfault now and then. Took me days to figure that out. With 2.6.25 kernels the board works fine, though it sometimes disables firewire and USB hotplug will never work (I just get a "Disabling IRQ #19"-message a boot). I can't really recommend AMD chipsets.

10/15/08 @ 09:42

Comment from: Josh Saddler [Member]

· http://dev.gentoo.org/~nightmorph

@Christoph:

Well, without information on your Asus motherboard's model, there's really nothing I can use.

I notice that the reviews on NewEgg at least for the -EM HDMI model are generally very positive. The -CM (business) variant doesn't seem to do as well; possibly due to inferior components or some such. Maybe this is the one you have?

Since I'm not planning on going back to an nVidia chipset after all the issues this one has given me, AMD's the only thing left. Heh, what I'd really like is an Intel chipset for my existing AMD CPU.

10/15/08 @ 10:09

Comment from: Christoph Brill [Visitor]

Yeah. Without any product details my information is not really helpful. But sadly I can't access the box right now and don't remember the model.

But after this "experience" we switched from AMD Phenom X4 to Intel E7xyz for our new systems at work.

10/15/08 @ 10:33

Comment from: Kevin Bowling [Visitor]

· http://www.kev009.com/

Did you ever check the RAM? I think something like 90% of hardware failures are a combination of RAM and PS failure. You'll have a hell of a time finding it without ECC as well.

10/15/08 @ 11:45

Comment from: Josh Saddler [Member]

· http://dev.gentoo.org/~nightmorph

@Kevin:

Yeah, RAM ain't the issue. Before the board started locking up after just a bit of use, I was able to run memtest86 a few times, with tests lasting from a few hours to overnight to 24 hours+. No errors ever turned up.

Granted, I have regular DDR2, not the ECC variety, since my board doesn't support that. But still, normally memory errors are one of the first things to show up, either in memtest86 or in software things like segfaults or interesting messages in the logs. Memtest86 went okay, no segfaults are to be found, and my logs are completely devoid of any error messages.

10/15/08 @ 19:00

Comment from: Sodki [Visitor]

· http://sodki.org

I really don't know what I'll do if the motherboard doesn't solve the lockups. Weep quietly in a corner, perhaps. Swear off computers forever, maybe.

You could always buy an old Macintosh and join the PPC team. :-)

10/15/08 @ 19:33

Comment from: energyman [Visitor]

I had an Asrock AliveNF5-esata2+ which is a good working horse. nforce 520 chipset. It just works. No problems - and with later kernels NCQ works too. Realtek gb ethernet, couple of usefull slots, usb, firewire.

I now own an Asrock A770Crossfire which does have the SB700 southbridge. No SATA problems at all, but there is something wrong with usb+2.6.27. Have to look into that.

10/16/08 @ 15:54

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