[ Thanks to Ken Hendrickson for this
report: ]
I have found the Athlon + AMD 751/756 Chipset to be
UNUSABLE in Linux. Apparently, I am not the
only one.
The specific
page for this CPU/Motherboard combo indicates that it works for
Mandrake and SuSE. I found that it doesn’t work at
all with either Debian Potato or Woody. (I would have submitted a
comment to the page pointed to above, but they required me to
provide a valid email address and I refused to do that. I wonder
how many other sites have incomplete information due to their
anti-privacy policies. Note that the site that would not accept my
comments without a spam target, www.LinHardware.com, is
Ziff-Davis.)
Details:
-
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-71XE CPU AMD Athlon 750 MHz Memory Type Two CAS-2 128 MB DIMMs Memory Slots All combinations (1&2, 1&3, 2&3) tried. - Windows 98 and Windows NT were installed. Only a few blue
screens were noted. (Nothing out of the ordinary.) - Debian Potato was installed. System had severe problems
with virtual memory and page swapping. - The kernel was recompiled with MTRR support. A SuSE page
indicates that this is necessary for the Athlon/K7. Using the
new kernel with MTRR support did not help. - In an attempt to make the system usable, it was underclocked.
The front-side bus was clocked down to 90 MHz, and the CPU was thus
clocked down to 675 MHz. Underclocking didn’t
help. The system continued to be instable under
Linux. - Only 12 MB was recognized without a special LILO append
line to force the 256 MB to be used. - Debian System was upgraded to Woody. System continued to have
severe problems with virtual memory and page swapping. The
Debian package management system database was corrupted several
times. I finally gave up after the kernel panicked
over corruption in the ext2 root filesystem. - In my 9+ years of using Linux (since Oct ’91), I have never
seen so many kernel panics.
Conclusions:
- The Athlon CPU & AMD 751/756 Chipset motherboard
combination SHOULD NOT BE USED for Linux.