Help me find a motherboard...

Dec 13, 2003
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I need to find an Athlon motherboard with onboard video (of any type), onboard Gigabit Ethernet (with PXE boot capability, but all onboards I've seen can do that), and 333 or 400 FSB support. I'm putting together a cluster of computers and want to keep the add-on parts count down, even if it means spending a bit more on the motherboard. If the board has more features, that's fine, but all I care about (and all I'll ever use) is GigE and video.

Basically, the plan is to have (per node) a motherboard, CPU, 1 DIMM, and a power supply racked up and connected to a GigE switch, booting over the network and running Linux with the clustering software on an NFS mount. The problem set I'll be running on it requires reading a huge amount of data (3d rendering, minimum 100 MB worth of textures and attribute maps per frame), so I will need the full gigabit speed. The boot/NFS server is already set up and configured with a Fibre Channel RAID capable of pushing enough data to saturate a gigabit switched fabric. I've just been waiting on installing the nodes until I can find the motherboard I need.

So far, I've been able to find only motherboards that have either GigE or video onboard, not both, but I'm probably just missing something; I can't imagine that I'm the only one who needs that feature set...

Has anybody seen what I'm looking for?
 

moretoys

Member
Nov 21, 2000
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I don't know of a board off hand, just wanted to note that there are no boards I am aware of with native GigE for the XP, and I believe the A64 boards are to be released shortly. Just means the GigE would be limited by the PCI bus, which I believe is 133 Mb/s. So I don't think GigE will help you much.
Maybe a guru can help you more on this.
 

Vette73

Lifer
Jul 5, 2000
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Sorry but I know of NO athlonXP boards that have BOTH video and GigaE. Also the PCI bus will not allow a GigaE to run at full speed anyways.


The only AthlonXP board with video that supports 400mhz FSB is the updated board with the nForce2 IGP