[geeks] Gigabyte MB question

[Nadine Miller]

On May 11, 2009, at 5:42 AM, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Hello,
>
> As some may remember, I recently upgraded my Dell T105 to a killer
> quad-core Opteron (1356, IIRC), which left me with a "spare" Opteron
> 1210. And, in my passive way I've been looking for an interesting MB
> to put that Opteron 1210 on, and I think I found it. The Gigabyte
> GA-MA78GM-US2H:
>
> Mfg. Website: http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2997&ProductName=GA-MA78GM-US2H
>
> OpenSolaris HCL: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/systems/details/30688.html
>
> On Sale for $68 (after $15 rebate):
> http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0306586
>
> Interesting points:
>
> - Takes up to 16 Gigs (4x 4 Gig) of DDR2 RAM (though cost would be
> prohibitive - 8 Gigs (4x 2 Gig) would be affordable)
> - Gigabit Ethernet
> - Seemingly decent integrated graphics (ATi Radeon 3200, spec sheet
> talks about Blu-Ray palyback support)
> - Five SATA, one eSATA connectors
> - On-board "fake" RAID support (presumed Windows only)
> - One 16x, two 1x PCI-Express slots, two PCI slots
> - DVI-D, HDMI and HD15 video interfaces
> - Firewire
> - Supports AM2+ and AM3 CPUs (for future upgrades)
>
> And, the Opteron 1210 is specificly cited on the CPU compatibility
> chart (it is the only Opteron that IS, oddly enough):
>
> http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ProductID=2997
>
> The questions - Has anyone ever used this MB before? Anyone have any
> feedback on Gigabyte MBs? and finally, any suggestions on a reasonable
> cooling solutions for this CPU/MB combo? (I would likely run
> everything stock clock, so no OC needs for exceptional cooling.)

Can't speak to the specific mobo, but on my GA-EP45-UD3P, so far with  
Solaris 10 (not OpenSolaris or Solaris 11 pre-release aka "Community  
Edition" or whatever), I've had three minor (to me) issues crop up.

1) On-board JMicron "fake RAID" IDE combo: totally a bust, haven't  
been able to get it working at all even with a binary driver that  
someone pulled from Community Edition and compiled.  I have a Promise  
133TX if I need to use IDE drives going forward.  The weird thing is,  
I was able to put two SATA drives on that controller initially, and  
have one of them seen (that's how I did the fscking install!).  I  
ponied up $60 for a PCI/PCI-X Addonics SATA RAID/JBOD card based on  
the Silicon Image 3124 chipset (supports multi-lane), and am just  
going to ignore those purple JMicron SATA ports.

2) A driver alias is required for on-board RealTek NIC(s).  Supposedly  
there is a bug where the NIC will just fall off the net under heavy  
load, but I've not run across it yet.  But I've only been driving  
traffic to it from 100Based-T NICs on other machines.

3) You'll have to turn on AHCI mode in the BIOS to get a SATA optical  
drive to work.

My last "top shelf" motherboard was a Gigabyte.  I've had very good  
experiences with them, aside from a ~'00-ish one dying from crap  
Chinese capacitor bulge.  Now that they are using solid caps, I don't  
worry about them.

You might check tweaktown.com forums to see if there are any oddities  
reported with the BIOS for your board.  Early revs of mine had issues  
with "auto" settings for CPU/RAM when 8GB or more were put onto the  
board.  I had no trouble with mine, though.

As for cooling, I have a Zalman 9700 in mine, and it's overkill by a  
long shot.  I'm swapping it to a Zalman 7700 with red LEDs (my new  
case has a side window) since I find the 9700's blue LEDs annoying  
(and they don't match :-).  Any decent cooler should work fine, though  
if you want something quiet, go with a 120mm fan.  Zalman's all have  
the hardware to use on both Intel and AMD sockets (whatever the equiv  
of the 775 is on the AMD side) and have a very nice two piece mounting  
plate for the mobo.

=Nadine=