Hi All
I was going to start a new thread but this is closely related... Greggory may want to include some of this in his "current mainboard roundup".
Having had 2 systems overheat over the Easter weekend due to the AMD socket 940/AM2 cpu cooler retention bracket breaking I have just repaired 1 mainboard with an Antec Kuhler 650 - no more worries about inadequate brackets breaking as this bolts directly to the bracket on the underside of the mainboard replacing the retention bracket. Only had this running for a day but no leaks so far and the cpu certainly runs cooler then with the usual fan and giant heatsink - and with less noise :-)
Sadly the other system overheated so badly that it does not even post. Ah well, I was looking for an excuse to try a new mainboard and cpu - the Mrs frowns on spending money to replace items that are working OK.
I ended up purchasing a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 mainboard (AMD990/SB950 chipset) - seems to be current production - with an AMD FX-4300 cpu (Black Edition) and 2 sticks of 2Gb DDR3 ram. While assembling the system I noticed the lack of floppy and ide connections on the mainboard so if you rely on those devices this is not really the mainboard for you.
Having inserted an ATI X550 graphics card, connected drives and various cables it was finally time to power on and see what happened. However, before attempting to boot I entered the EUFI BIOS settings and made sure that a "Legacy" system would be able to boot and also set the boot order. I saved the settings, the system rebooted and displayed the AirBoot Boot Menu. I booted my eCS2.1 installation, updated with various drivers from eCS 2.2beta2.
The only problem encountered has been network - I cannot seem to find a Realtek RTL8186E driver that works - I've tried the eCS Multimac driver builds 1.2 and 1.3 and the Genmac rtl8186 package.
So far networking is a no go. Using the MultiMac 1.3 build seems to give the best results: Checking lantran.log all looks good, running setup.cmd gives no errors, File and Print Client completes without errors - all looks good until testing connectivity: there is not any. PMPing cannot ping any ip address except for 127.0.0.1
I guess the option is to turn off the onboard network and insert a nic: Recommendations, Please.
Apart from the networking problem this seems to be a good board, system seems stable and happy - and fast :-)
Obviously I am not expecting SATA3, USB3 and 1394 to work with eCS - but am hopeful that USB3 and SATA3 drivers will appear in the fullness of time.
Yes, a good chance that this system will also end up with a watercooled cpu in the near future - will keep an eye on the recently converted system for a few weeks before making a decision.
Regards
Pete