Author Topic: Best 775 socket motherboard for a Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield QuadCore  (Read 18901 times)

Andi B.

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2) Is best to still use a X800 or X850 TX PE with SNAP accelerated. or a newer high-end card using the Panorama driver?
It depends :-)

If you're happy with 1920x1200 then X300/X500/X800 would be good enough. In that case I would prefer a X300 without fan. But I couldn't find a X300 with 2 DVI so I use 1 monitor with DVI and the second one via analog RGB attached (2 times 1920x1200). If you need more resolution like 3840x2160 you need a more modern graphic chip with DisplayPort (or HDMI2.x at least). See https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,2389.msg28545.html#msg28545 and you've to use Panorama.

Greggory Shaw

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2) Is best to still use a X800 or X850 TX PE with SNAP accelerated. or a newer high-end card using the Panorama driver?
It depends :-)

If you're happy with 1920x1200 then X300/X500/X800 would be good enough. In that case I would prefer a X300 without fan. But I couldn't find a X300 with 2 DVI so I use 1 monitor with DVI and the second one via analog RGB attached (2 times 1920x1200). If you need more resolution like 3840x2160 you need a more modern graphic chip with DisplayPort (or HDMI2.x at least). See https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,2389.msg28545.html#msg28545 and you've to use Panorama.


Thanks Andi,

I went with an ATI X800 I couldn't find a x850 in good enough condition and got tired of looking.

Can Linux use the ATI Crossfire setup or even OS/2? I was looking for that just for kicks and play around with it. Does anyone have experience with the ATI Crossfire.

Or more like can I use Crossfire dual boot with Linux and will OS/2 boot with a Crossfire setup.

Anyaways I went with this board, I'll report back later - ASUS P5W DH DELUXE/WIFI-AP <GREEN> LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard

Greggory

« Last Edit: May 21, 2021, 07:51:59 pm by Greggory Shaw »

Dave Yeo

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Linux likely doesn't even support the X800, little well crossfire on it. No idea about OS/2, Snap doesn't mention it.

Eugene Tucker

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I had a ATI 800 and it worked with Snap then I upgraded to an ATI 850 and I still have it in a box. It too worked will with SNAP. The 850 was the last card that I had that worked with the SNAP driver. I tink maybe and Nvidia 6600 worked too. but I am not certain.

Dave Yeo

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I had a ATI 800 and it worked with Snap then I upgraded to an ATI 850 and I still have it in a box. It too worked will with SNAP. The 850 was the last card that I had that worked with the SNAP driver. I tink maybe and Nvidia 6600 worked too. but I am not certain.

Yes, they all work with Snap, I even had a Nvidia 8800 IIRC, that worked after turning on the unsupported option. It's whether they work with crossfire or the Nvidia equivalent.
If you look at x:\os2\drivers\snap\graphics.bpd there is a list of all (un)supported drivers, for Nvidia, it goes up to the 8800 GTS and for ATI, the Radeon X1900 seems like the latest.
There were also patches floating around to get slightly newer cards working, assuming the same driver worked, for example perhaps the X1950 would work with a patch.

Greggory Shaw

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I had a ATI 800 and it worked with Snap then I upgraded to an ATI 850 and I still have it in a box. It too worked will with SNAP. The 850 was the last card that I had that worked with the SNAP driver. I tink maybe and Nvidia 6600 worked too. but I am not certain.

Yes, they all work with Snap, I even had a Nvidia 8800 IIRC, that worked after turning on the unsupported option. It's whether they work with crossfire or the Nvidia equivalent.
If you look at x:\os2\drivers\snap\graphics.bpd there is a list of all (un)supported drivers, for Nvidia, it goes up to the 8800 GTS and for ATI, the Radeon X1900 seems like the latest.
There were also patches floating around to get slightly newer cards working, assuming the same driver worked, for example perhaps the X1950 would work with a patch.


Hi Dave,

Do you have an idea to where I can get that patch?


Thanks Greggory

Dave Yeo

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IIRC, I saw a patch or 2 uploaded to Hobbes.
It shouldn't be too hard to use a binary editor on graphics.bbp and edit something close to what you need, changing the PCI ID and name of card. I've never tried and it really depends on the chipset being similar enough to what is supported.
As usual, your mileage may vary and backup just in case something goes badly wrong.

David Kiley

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And I like messing around with older stuff !

Cheers,


Greggory
Hi Greggory,
I like old stuff too :).
When I was going to install os/2 on an old rig I read good compatibility reports for  the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L which would work with your CPU. That motherboard has all solid caps too.. good for durability.
As I remember everything was reported to work except for the nic - but it is easy to get a pci nic to throw in there.
You would also need a graphics card for it since that motherboard doesn't have a built in integrated video.

I ended up deciding emulating arcaos is the best bet for me though so I didn't end up using the board myself and ended up donating the board to a friend - just passing along what I had read about it though.

David Kiley

Greggory Shaw

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And I like messing around with older stuff !

Cheers,


Greggory
Hi Greggory,
I like old stuff too :).
When I was going to install os/2 on an old rig I read good compatibility reports for  the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L which would work with your CPU. That motherboard has all solid caps too.. good for durability.
As I remember everything was reported to work except for the nic - but it is easy to get a pci nic to throw in there.
You would also need a graphics card for it since that motherboard doesn't have a built in integrated video.

I ended up deciding emulating arcaos is the best bet for me though so I didn't end up using the board myself and ended up donating the board to a friend - just passing along what I had read about it though.

David Kiley

Thx, David

But I already ordered a ASUS P5W DH DELUXE board (based on OS2USER's suggestion of the P5 Deluxe) and an ATI X1900 from Dave !!! And it comes with two nics and just about every other port available at that time, hopefully they work.

I had the idea to buy everything new, but that ended up being about $2,000 or more, wow, old hardware as some value.

Here's what I got for less than $300 !!! The power supply and tower were both $30 off from Newegg and Amazon gave me $70 off too.

And I'm going to throw in a pair of Seagate ST1000LM014 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" SSHD Bare Drives in a RAID setup.


 ASUS P5W DH DELUXE/WIFI-AP <GREEN> LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard




NEW 2 packs OCZ Technology PC2-6400 4GB kit(1x4) 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM DIMM Memory




ATI Radeon X1900GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express (PCIe) Dual DVI Video Card w/TV-Out




SAMSUNG 870 EVO Series 2.5" 500GB SATA III V-NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-77E500B/AM




DIYPC Silence-BK-Window Black SPCC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case




EVGA 500 BA 100-BA-0500-K1 500W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI CrossFire 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Non-Modular Active PFC Power Supply





« Last Edit: May 28, 2021, 02:47:27 pm by Greggory Shaw »

Dave Yeo

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Hi Greggory,
Not sure if a RAID setup will work under OS/2, a hardware one might but then you're stuck if your MB dies unless you get another close to the same.
Another consideration is ideally the SSD's should be partitioned in such a way that the physical 4k blocks line up with the JFS logical 4k blocks. IIRC, there is a switch in the AHCI driver to make it easier or else have to do the math.

Greggory Shaw

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Hi Greggory,
Not sure if a RAID setup will work under OS/2, a hardware one might but then you're stuck if your MB dies unless you get another close to the same.
Another consideration is ideally the SSD's should be partitioned in such a way that the physical 4k blocks line up with the JFS logical 4k blocks. IIRC, there is a switch in the AHCI driver to make it easier or else have to do the math.


Thanks Dave

I didn't know about 4k block configuration.

I have an OS/2 compatible RAID card from a long ago somewhere.


Greggory


Update - Dave - sense I ordered another motherboard and changed my mind, I may as well use Linux setup RAID on that, thx
« Last Edit: May 28, 2021, 06:03:02 pm by Greggory Shaw »

Doug Bissett

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Not sure if a RAID setup will work under OS/2, a hardware one might but then you're stuck if your MB dies unless you get another close to the same.

Even if it is a hardware RAID (highly unlikely), it might not work in OS/2. Some years ago, I got a SATA PCI adapter, so I could use SATA disks in my antique Asus P4VP-MX machine (I use that machine as an ArcaOS based NAS box, with a 2 TB drive). It has a hardware RAID on the card, but it is not usable with OS/2, simply because it needs a driver to turn RAID on at boot time. The whole RAID setup is done by code that is attached to the BIOS (no OS required), but it needs that driver to actually turn it on, or it just uses the basic, single drive, disk access (which is exactly what I want anyway). I did not bother to try to make RAID work <see below>.

At the time, I did some reading about how RAID actually works (there is more than one method), and quickly came to the conclusion that RAID is a rich man's toy, that isn't worth the work, or expense. Sure, if you are doing medical monitoring, or  the machine isn't available for manual repair (like space craft), when storage goes bad, but in a normal work station it is nothing but unnecessary overhead. High performance, high demand, servers may justify it, but, as Arca Noae found out, if the RAID controller goes bad, it can take out ALL of the copies, leaving you to rebuild your system manually (you still need to make good backups, and that is less work than trying to manage a RAID). It is also a good idea to get a spare disk, because they all need to match, and a match may not be available when one goes bad (probably won't happen in the next 30 years anyway).

The rest looks like it should work, but you are probably spending more money than it will be worth. If you use the machine to run games, under windows, it might be worth it, but you are selecting a lot of expensive (even with discounts) hardware, that isn't going to do anything for OS/2 (the video adapter, for instance - most modern processors come with a video adapter built in, that will run circles around older devices, when using Panorama). Ask yourself: "what are you going to do with 1 TB of disk space?". Even 500 GB of disk space remains mostly empty, on my systems (except the 2 TB drive, which contains multiple backups of all of the rest of my systems).

Those large disks lead to a user not maintaining their disk space, which adds to the size of backups, and not being able to find what you are looking for. I know, for sure, that about 30% of the data on my HDDs should be removed (80%, if you count windows), but it is just too much work to do it. It would have been easy, if I had maintained a 250 GB disk, over the years. My two 1 TB drives are left with large empty spaces, just waiting for something to get lost on them. My most efficient system has a 30 GB disk, and 6 GB of that is taken up by win98 (I boot that about once per year, just because...). ArcaOS 5.0.6 is quite happy with the rest. Of course, I don't keep my photos, or music collection, on that disk. They get saved to a DVD (it does have a DVD drive - USB also works, but it is a single USB1 port), and that works just as well as having them on the HDD (I don't use that machine much anyway).

I did replace 500 GB HDDs, with 500 GB SSDs, on two of my laptops. That was not to gain speed (it helps), but more for shock protection. The price, of SSDs, is now in the "reasonable" range. If you want "high speed" disk, get a high performance NVME device, but be sure that it will use all 4 PCIe lanes for data transfer (4 lanes seems to be what is now available, it should be possible to use all 16 lanes, when/if the devices are produced).

Greggory Shaw

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Not sure if a RAID setup will work under OS/2, a hardware one might but then you're stuck if your MB dies unless you get another close to the same.

Even if it is a hardware RAID (highly unlikely), it might not work in OS/2. Some years ago, I got a SATA PCI adapter, so I could use SATA disks in my antique Asus P4VP-MX machine (I use that machine as an ArcaOS based NAS box, with a 2 TB drive). It has a hardware RAID on the card, but it is not usable with OS/2, simply because it needs a driver to turn RAID on at boot time. The whole RAID setup is done by code that is attached to the BIOS (no OS required), but it needs that driver to actually turn it on, or it just uses the basic, single drive, disk access (which is exactly what I want anyway). I did not bother to try to make RAID work <see below>.

Yes, it's hardware based with an OS/2 driver in a Dell Power workstation.

Quote
At the time, I did some reading about how RAID actually works (there is more than one method), and quickly came to the conclusion that RAID is a rich man's toy, that isn't worth the work, or expense. Sure, if you are doing medical monitoring, or  the machine isn't available for manual repair (like space craft), when storage goes bad, but in a normal work station it is nothing but unnecessary overhead. High performance, high demand, servers may justify it, but, as Arca Noae found out, if the RAID controller goes bad, it can take out ALL of the copies, leaving you to rebuild your system manually (you still need to make good backups, and that is less work than trying to manage a RAID). It is also a good idea to get a spare disk, because they all need to match, and a match may not be available when one goes bad (probably won't happen in the next 30 years anyway).

Yes, I change my mind in the middle of ordering parts, so I going to setup a Linux server for RAID.

Quote
The rest looks like it should work, but you are probably spending more money than it will be worth. If you use the machine to run games, under windows, it might be worth it, but you are selecting a lot of expensive (even with discounts) hardware, that isn't going to do anything for OS/2 (the video adapter, for instance - most modern processors come with a video adapter built in, that will run circles around older devices, when using Panorama). Ask yourself: "what are you going to do with 1 TB of disk space?". Even 500 GB of disk space remains mostly empty, on my systems (except the 2 TB drive, which contains multiple backups of all of the rest of my systems).

It's for playing around as stated above.

Quote
Those large disks lead to a user not maintaining their disk space, which adds to the size of backups, and not being able to find what you are looking for. I know, for sure, that about 30% of the data on my HDDs should be removed (80%, if you count windows), but it is just too much work to do it. It would have been easy, if I had maintained a 250 GB disk, over the years. My two 1 TB drives are left with large empty spaces, just waiting for something to get lost on them. My most efficient system has a 30 GB disk, and 6 GB of that is taken up by win98 (I boot that about once per year, just because...). ArcaOS 5.0.6 is quite happy with the rest. Of course, I don't keep my photos, or music collection, on that disk. They get saved to a DVD (it does have a DVD drive - USB also works, but it is a single USB1 port), and that works just as well as having them on the HDD (I don't use that machine much anyway).

I used that much space and more because I ripped all my DVDs. And I have 8 websites that get backed up daily in 30 day cycles. Three times on the hosted, cloud, and now home, plus the databases only.

Quote
I did replace 500 GB HDDs, with 500 GB SSDs, on two of my laptops. That was not to gain speed (it helps), but more for shock protection. The price, of SSDs, is now in the "reasonable" range. If you want "high speed" disk, get a high performance NVME device, but be sure that it will use all 4 PCIe lanes for data transfer (4 lanes seems to be what is now available, it should be possible to use all 16 lanes, when/if the devices are produced).

And as stated above I'm building a top of the line box for work too (Win 10).


Thx

Greggory

Dave Yeo

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Yea, everyone has different usages. Another consideration is that most file systems such as JFS work best with lots of empty space.