Opinion/experience with Intel 845E nodes?

[Ferdinand Geier]

Am Donnerstag, 1. August 2002 21:20 schrieb Robert G. Brown:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, David Mathog wrote:
>
> I have an 845G motherboard that works well enough (MSI 845GMax) for the
> purpose of being a node.  Its advantage is that it comes with onboard
> 100BT and video (and sound).  Its disadvantage is that the video drivers
> don't work (yet) except maybe in bleeding edge XF86 snapshots, although
> it is coming, the sound is misidentified and doesn't load correctly.
> The ethernet, however, works (using eepro100 drivers)!  I haven't yet
> tested to see if PXE works -- it would be lovely if it did.  So one can
> build a single CPU P4 node for cheap, as you note (case, motherboard,
> memory, cpu), maybe requiring a floppy and hard disk if PXE doesn't
> work.  If PXE works, one could probably build P4 nodes using
> less-than-bleeding-edge CPUS but exploiting the good memory performance
> for maybe $600-700. Motherboard ($120), P4 at 1800 ($210), and 512 MB
> (currently $190 for the pricey PC2700/333, but a week or three ago when
> I bought it was more like $90) is $520, so add a case and floppy for
> $100 and a hard disk for $80?
>
> I actually bought it for my home desktop and added video, sound and
> CD-RW -- makes a nice little system.

I've also a 845G board in my Fujitsu-Siemens box, but it does not correctly 
detect the IDE controller:

<6>Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
<4>ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with 
idebus=xx
<4>PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device f9, VID=8086, 
DID=24cb
<3>PCI: Device 00:1f.1 not available because of resource collisions
<4>PCI_IDE: chipset revision 1
<4>PCI_IDE: not 100%% native mode: will probe irqs later
<4>    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x2800-0x2807, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
<4>    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x2808-0x280f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
<4>hda: MAXTOR 6L080L4, ATA DISK drive
<4>hdb: MAXTOR 6L080L4, ATA DISK drive
<4>hdc: IDE-CD R/RW 24x12A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
<4>hdd: LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

With a stock 2.2.18 kernel dma could be enabled, but the SuSE kernel 
refused to do. Maybe the chip is too new...

-- 
Ferdinand Geier
ParTec AG
Tel +49.89.998090