939 motherboard with easy FC4 install?

[brightman]

This should be an easy question.... (don't laugh!).

I'm looking to build an AMD 64 system for a backend and want to get a motherboard which will 'just work' with the latest FC4 kernel. I want to install FC4 from CD do a yum update and have 'stuff work'.

I'm going to need 2 NICs one of which needs to be gigabit ethernet. I'm happy to use an onboard NIC and then buy a separate card for the other one.

Because the system is going to be a backend I'll just buy a low end graphics card.

I'd prefer to use 64bit FC4 but it sounds like the performace hit in using the 32bit version is not too bad whereas the pain is significantly less?

For storage I'll need 'quite a bit' although it doesn't have to be blindingly fast, I'm thinking of 2 x IDE 250GByte HDs... SATA is an option if compatibility is not a problem. I'd be perfectly happy to use an IDE disk for the FC4 install and then have SATA drives for storage?... does that make sense?.

Is there an obvious motherboard to choose?

If I've missed an obvious post that answers these questions I apologise now

[anupak]

I have been using ASUS A8N SLI Premium (AMD 64 3200+) with FC4 with no issues for last 6 months. This is a 939 motherboard with 2 GIG ethernet ports. However I have not used the RAID (SATA & PATA) features so far.

-Anup

[psb154]

The A8N SLI Premium is an excellent choice. It gets really good reviews in magazines.

[brightman]

Looks good! I see it uses the Marvell 88E8001 LAN chipset which seems well supported by FC4.

Thanks for the information... ideally I'd like more PCI slots (i.e. I don't need the SLI graphics so would rather have an extra PCI slot) but at least I have one candidate now.

[brightman]

Has anyone used the Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 mobo? Although based on the nForce3 Ultra it has two NICs (1 Fast Ethernet and 1 Gigabyt ethernet but this is OK) and 5 PCI slots.

If I was sure that FC4 would install easily I think this would be my choice? Anyone any comments?

[Shakes]

My motherboard supports socket 939, works with Fedora Core 4 and ran successfully with a sata hard-drive from the veyr beginning. It's a gigabyte GA-K8NF-9, which is based on NVidia nforce 4. It's pci express graphics though so I dunno if that is suitable for you. I get the feeling (tho this is a guess) that most sata drives would be ok with NVidia boards because it seemed to pick the "sata_nv" (or was it "nv_sata"driver) during the install.

[Shakes]

Oh yeah and u were asking about the 64bit vs 32 bit FC. I have been using the 64 bit version. It's not really a problem, except things like the Macromedia Flash plug in don't support 64 bit, which is a pain in the teeth. Apart from that, I haven't had too many issues.

Oh yeah, my UT2003 install needed to use the "linux32" command to dupe it into thinking I was 32 bit, but once I figured that out the install went fine and it worked fine.

Put it this way, I have have gone for the 64 bit version of FC5, so it hasn't phased me too much :-)