If it's not too late, return the motherboard, get something else.

My personal experience with Intel's desktop motherboards is that they work most of the time for most of the people.

thats been the exact opposite of my experiences with Intel branded motherboards. They've been consistently well engineered, and well built, have very good aftermarket support (BIOS upgrades and drivers are still available for nearly every board they've ever made, and they are MUCH better documented than the typical taiwan stuff). Intel has had a few funky chipsets that NO motherboards could fix (anything that used RDRAM, and worse, the chipsets that used RD->SDRAM bridges like the i810), but otherwise I've found them very compatible. I do try and avoid the chipsets with onboard graphics.

I've never seen ANY documentation like ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/lt/D5601702US.pdf (for the DP965LT, a current mainstream performance board I'd strongly consider using for a Core 2 Duo desktop) from any taiwan board maker. Note they actually give power specifications for the board, thermal design guidelines, etc. Detailed errata in ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/lt/D6333603US.pdf (ever seen errata on a taiwan board? muahaahahahaha, right!)

RHEL/CentOS 4 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and support for the latest hardware is somewhat lagging, this can be an issue with any new system.

Hmm..I have not used that hardware myself..but from the release notes, it looks like it is supported (with a work around): From: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/html/release-notes/as-x86/RELEASE -NOTES-U4-en.html

<snip>

Support for the Intel I/O Controller Hub (ICH8) southbridge chipset is now available. Note

If your system uses the ICH8 SATA controller and the BIOS is set to IDE mode for the controller, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4 will not recognize the attached drives.

To work around this issue, enable the ICH8 controller in AHCI mode from within the BIOS. Red Hat plans to fix this issue in future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For more information, please refer to Red Hat Knowledge Base at the following URL:

http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/

</snip>

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Drew Weaver Sent: December 6, 2006 10:12 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: RE: [CentOS] CentOS 4 and Intel D965 motherboards

Would it be possible for CentOS to release an installer for 4.4 that uses a newer kernel, or maybe the same kernel patched to work with ICH8? It would be a great boon to a great many folks I'd imagine. At the very least ensure that CentOS 5 works with ICH8?

-Drew

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 2:40 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] CentOS 4 and Intel D965 motherboards

If it's not too late, return the motherboard, get something else.

My personal experience with Intel's desktop motherboards is that they work most of the time for most of the people.

thats been the exact opposite of my experiences with Intel branded motherboards. They've been consistently well engineered, and well built, have very good aftermarket support (BIOS upgrades and drivers are still available for nearly every board they've ever made, and they are MUCH better documented than the typical taiwan stuff). Intel has had a few funky chipsets that NO motherboards could fix (anything that used RDRAM, and worse, the chipsets that used RD->SDRAM bridges like the i810), but otherwise I've found them very compatible. I do try and avoid the chipsets with onboard graphics.

I've never seen ANY documentation like ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/lt/D5601702US.pdf (for the DP965LT, a current mainstream performance board I'd strongly consider using for a Core 2 Duo desktop) from any taiwan board maker. Note they

actually give power specifications for the board, thermal design guidelines, etc. Detailed errata in ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/lt/D6333603US.pdf (ever seen errata on a taiwan board? muahaahahahaha, right!)

RHEL/CentOS 4 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and support for the latest hardware is somewhat lagging, this can be an issue with any new system. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Quoting John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com:

...

If it's not too late, return the motherboard, get something else.

My personal experience with Intel's desktop motherboards is that they work most of the time for most of the people.

thats been the exact opposite of my experiences with Intel branded motherboards. They've been consistently well engineered, and well built, have very good aftermarket support (BIOS upgrades and drivers are still available for nearly every board they've ever made, and they are MUCH better documented than the typical taiwan stuff).

Have you ever had to actually deal with Intel support. Like, you have an issue, they resolve it? I had to call them couple of times. They did little or nothing. The answer was always "it is not our problem that motherboard we made doesn't work". Well engineered? Motherboard that doesn't want to power on because you plugged a PCI card into it can hardly be called well engineered. Thermal specs available on the web? More or less useless to end users.

As I said. They work most of the time. When they do work, they work great. When they don't work, good luck in getting any kind of support from Intel. Been there, done that. Ended up dissapointed big time.

Drew Weaver wrote:

We have roughly 1200 Intel motherboards in production at the moment.. From the server line SE7500/SE7501/S2000/S3000, the desktop line, 845GLC, 945GTP, various 865 and 915 boards, and I believe we have had one single failure out of all of them including DOA, run failures, etc.

YMMV but we used to use asus/tyan boards and we had a much higher failure/DOA rate.

Thanks, -Drew

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Aleksandar Milivojevic Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 10:21 AM To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] CentOS 4 and Intel D965 motherboards

Quoting John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com:

...

...

If it's not too late, return the motherboard, get something else.

My personal experience with Intel's desktop motherboards is that they

...

...

work most of the time for most of the people.

thats been the exact opposite of my experiences with Intel branded motherboards. They've been consistently well engineered, and well built, have very good aftermarket support (BIOS upgrades and drivers are still available for nearly every board they've ever made, and they

...

are MUCH better documented than the typical taiwan stuff).

Have you ever had to actually deal with Intel support. Like, you have an issue, they resolve it? I had to call them couple of times. They did little or nothing. The answer was always "it is not our problem that motherboard we made doesn't work". Well engineered? Motherboard that doesn't want to power on because you plugged a PCI card into it can hardly be called well engineered. Thermal specs available on the web? More or less useless to end users.

As I said. They work most of the time. When they do work, they work great. When they don't work, good luck in getting any kind of support from Intel. Been there, done that. Ended up dissapointed big time.

I can't say that I've been through as many boards as Drew, but his experience is similar to mine. I've had very few outright failures of Intel boards. My only real complaint with Intel boards has been the somewhat spartan feature set, but for servers that is usually not a problem. I've had a few bugs over the years (most of them on the i820 and old i810/815 boards), but nothing that's bitten me hard in recent memory. I've had a number of desktop machines with Abit and MSI boards that suffered from outright failures or just horrid instability issues. For "off brand" boards, I'm trying to stick with Tyan (bugs here too, but no show stoppers yet) and Supermicro (no problems to report there).

Cheers,