[ Thanks to Tom
Moran for this link. ]
“There’s no doubt about it: AMD Durons and Athlons offer users
the best bang for your buck right now. For everything from low-end
servers down to glorified typewriters, there’s an AMD Socket-A
solution that fits the bill. But which motherboard should you use
for that new Linux box? To help answer that question, we compare
the latest mid-priced Socket A offerings from AOpen and
Soyo….”
“Both boards use the VIA Apollo KT133 chipset and can support
Athlon/Duron Socket-A CPUs with speeds up to 1 GHz. To test these
boards, I used a 700 MHz Duron and a 128MB PC100 SDRAM DIMM. I did
the majority of my testing using Linux-Mandrake 7.1….”
“At first glance, the Soyo board seems to be better outfitted
than the AOpen board. For some strange reason, the AOpen folks
chose not to put the second external serial port in the common spot
— I don’t know why, since there’s room for it right where other
ATX boards put it. Instead, this port is found on a separate
bracket that takes up one of the slots on your case. On a case like
the Zephyr, this is no problem, but bracket-mounted ports always
annoy me because they can be so easily bent.”