# Best motherboards for FreeBSD 2012?



## ikbendeman (Sep 9, 2012)

Any suggestions? I have always preferred AMD. I require at least a dual core, as my system functions as numerous servers. One of my four hard drives is on it's last leg (S.M.A.R.T Failure + erratic recognition in FreeBSD 8.2). Quad core or even multi-processor would be nice as well. IDE would be nice as well for backwards compatability, however, this is not a requirement. I do not want on-board video as I would like the opportunity to dual boot, though this will likely never happen (I just have a weakness for the Fallout series of video games, though I've heard WINE support has come much farther for games since the last time I gave it a shot). 

In otherwords, what motherboards have the best support in FreeBSD, including network drivers, chipset drivers, SATA drivers, everything else onboard. Also important is BIOS options. I hate that a lot of these new BIOSes give you no control over anything, especially overclocking, chip-speed, et cetera.

My main usages:
Multimedia server
SFTP server
Multimedia encoding
File sharing
SSH server
Possibly games

ANY suggestions would be _greatly_ appreciated. I will start doing research and post links and see what you guys think. Have any of you guys purchased motherboards and had issues or good luck within the last 6 months/year?


----------



## wblock@ (Sep 9, 2012)

The Gigabyte Z68A-D3H-B3 has given good results for me.  That's a mid-level Intel motherboard with a BIOS that makes overclocking and specific voltage control pretty easy.  Nothing against AMD, just the last couple of generations don't compare well with the Intel CPUs.

Onboard video does not affect dual-booting.  At present, I have the Intel video disabled and use a Radeon HD4650, but may switch to just the Intel now that the Intel KMS is nearly done.


----------



## ikbendeman (Sep 9, 2012)

I will probably go with an intel processor, but an nvidia video card...


----------



## Mattjones (Sep 14, 2012)

Have you considered the new Asus P8C WS? Possibly with a Xeon processor? I have been using the Asus P8B WS version with a Xeon E3 processor with great results.


----------



## break19 (Sep 14, 2012)

My Gigabyte MA770-UD3P works fine. Supports up to phenom2 x6


----------



## myst3r10n (Sep 15, 2012)

Have anybody an *Asrock Z77 Pro4* tested or know more about support?

The LAN Realtek 8111E should be supported:


			
				SirDice said:
			
		

> Initial support was added to 8-STABLE in February 2011.
> 
> 
> ```
> ...


Source: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=33689

And the audio Realtek ALC892 should be supported too: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20574. Planned is a 3rd generation Intel i5 CPU with AES-NI for GELI and VT-x for qemu. Like ikbendeman said, I won't onboard video too, but that's very difficult to find. Today most mainboards have built-in video. Anyway, my target is a desktop machine for daily tasks and especially for developing Java based applications. I'm still not sure about video card, maybe a HIS HD 7750 iCooler. But, as far as I know, the support for Radeon card isn't very well.


----------



## kpedersen (Sep 16, 2012)

The older radeons (pre HD) have satisfactory support (better than the nv driver)

Perhaps you might consider getting onboard intel GFX. I don't think Intel do standalone cards (which is a shame) but I think the older onboard stuff (like on laptops) GMA9xx work very nicely!

To be safe though, just get an outboard nvidia card. The binary blob works fine in almost all cases.


----------



## ikbendeman (Sep 17, 2012)

I always run nVidia


----------



## hostinfo (Sep 17, 2012)

Intel dual core processors are best platform to run the FreeBSD


----------



## UNIXgod (Sep 17, 2012)

hostinfo said:
			
		

> Intel dual core processors are best platform to run the FreeBSD



Why?


----------



## m6tt (Oct 4, 2012)

http://www.tyan.com/product_boards2...ll&chipsetid=all&socketnum=all&formfactor=all

Everything has been compatible on every Tyan I've ever tried, and support is very good.


----------



## throAU (Oct 4, 2012)

hostinfo said:
			
		

> Intel dual core processors are best platform to run the FreeBSD



Damn, I guess I should ditch my 12 core Xeon boxes then.


----------



## akil (Oct 4, 2012)

Hi,

Here is my motherboard:


Asus P8Z77-v ( with Atheros AR9485 included )

Only two things doesn't work. 

Atheros AR9485, FreeBSD doesn't have driver for that chip. Front panel for snd_hda seems to not working properly. In case of sound, I didn't  yet found enough time to investigate it, in case of my extra wifi I can't do anything right now.

Raid works great. I was afraid about EFI, but there is no troubles with it. So from my point of view, everything works brilliant.


----------



## Zare (Oct 4, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> Damn, I guess I should ditch my 12 core Xeon boxes then.



I could trade my dual core Intel (Atom 1.6) box for your 12 core Xeon box. You're welcome.


----------



## KdeBruin (Oct 5, 2012)

I'm happy with my ASRock B75 Pro3-M board and an Intel Pentium G840. It is mainly used as a NAS and the 5 SATA2 and 3 SATA3 ports are very helpful in this situation.


----------



## myst3r10n (Oct 17, 2012)

The *Asrock Z77 Pro4* working well with FreeBSD too. Audio works, LAN, SATA and the built-in GPU over Intel HD 2500. It's just the VESA driver but if you wanted faster then just install a NVIDIA card


----------



## ColdfireMC (Oct 18, 2012)

intel Dx79TO, works fine, but front sound works weird with pcm


----------



## kclark (Oct 18, 2012)

UNIXgod said:
			
		

> Why?



I've always loved AMD, for the price and performance I usually default to them.  On the other hand I've found that I get better reliability out of Intel and they generally run cooler than AMD.  I can usually run an Intel chip a year or two longer than AMD too.  I hate to say it but the more I've used both I'm starting to become an Intel guy.


----------



## UNIXgod (Oct 18, 2012)

hostinfo said:
			
		

> Intel dual core processors are best platform to run the FreeBSD





			
				kclark said:
			
		

> I've always loved AMD, for the price and performance I usually default to them.  On the other hand I've found that I get better reliability out of Intel and they generally run cooler than AMD.  I can usually run an Intel chip a year or two longer than AMD too.  I hate to say it but the more I've used both I'm starting to become an Intel guy.



Interesting. But the OP which I asked didn't state it as an opinion, nor ever came back after that post to back up any evidence to why "intel dual cores are the best platform".

There is no incompatibility issues between amd64 from one manufacturer to the next. As for cooling I have run them both and have not had issues. Unless your overclocking, which you wouldn't do with a server, there is absolutely no difference.


----------



## thorbsd (Oct 18, 2012)

I've personally only run FreeBSD on Intel processors in desktop use machines, but one thing I've heard mentioned a few times now is that by going with AMD, you can get your core count fairly high for a lot less money than by going with Intel. 

In situations where having additional cores can be beneficial (such as when running a server or running virtual machines), you might consider going with AMD.


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Oct 19, 2012)

Just a few days ago I read an article about the inner workings of AMD vs Intel. Forget AMD. Don't look at cores, clock speed, anything. Forget it. The ship has sailed.. AMD cannot compete.


----------



## ColdfireMC (Oct 19, 2012)

AMD is now focused on his new modular architecture. they have reason about FPU's: statistically, faster fpu's are better than  not so faster and more fpu's, but unfortunately, programs are not following this model, and amd's ALU's are still being slow and inneficient compared with intel's ALU's.


----------



## m6tt (Oct 21, 2012)

Core count helps with compiling for sure. It's true AMD is hurting lately, although I still prefer them for VM boxes...hyperthreads can be crappy for VMs, esp. if the hypervisor isn't HT aware. I'm also concerned what will happen to CPU prices if we all use "intel dual cores". 

I like my i7, and I like my opterons. They both are very fast, and I am usually limited by IO. Any intel with "turbo" core will run hotter than an AMD, it's supposed to run up to a certain temp before throttling, which given intel's better fabs and designs, is a high temperature...kind of painful in the laptop though.


----------



## Uniballer (Oct 21, 2012)

m6tt said:
			
		

> Core count helps with compiling for sure.



To a point.  See CPU Selection thread.


----------



## gpw928 (Oct 22, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> Just a few days ago I read an article about the inner workings of AMD vs Intel. Forget AMD. Don't look at cores, clock speed, anything. Forget it. The ship has sailed.. AMD cannot compete.



Hi,

I agree that Intel is ahead of AMD in performance right now, and has been for some time.  I also agree that Intel's faster single-core CPU performance is generally a better bet if you can't characterise parallelism in your CPU load.

However I heartily disagree with the sentiment that "AMD cannot compete".  Not every user, nor every process, nor every thread needs (or can even use) the fastest possible CPU.  If they can, then parallelism from multiple cores may provide massively better performance than that possible on a single core (FreeBSD "make -j8 buildkernel" is a case in point).

The reason that AMD are not (yet) broke is that they can compete on grunts per dollar.  They just can't do as many grunts per core per second as Intel.

For the record, the last two systems I built were 4-core AMD systems, sized to their load, cheaper than the Intel option, and remarkably fit for purpose (MythTV server and client: doing video decoding, rendering, transcoding, etc. in parallel on multiple cores).

There are many other instances where the CPU is not usually the limiting factor, e.g. storage servers (bottleneck is usually I/O and/or network), and game servers (bottleneck is usually PCI bus bandwidth and video rendering).

Most generally, the smart play is about sizing the CPUs and cores to the processes and threads, and then buy the best value CPU for money.

However, the next general purpose desktop I build will almost certainly be Intel, because I keep my desktops a long time, and want maximum future flexibility, and thus a current performance leader.


Cheers,


----------



## m6tt (Oct 22, 2012)

I have an 8 core dual socket AMD machine. I noticed CURRENT was having issues saturating it under load until a week or so ago, not sure what that was about. I do a buildworld -j(NTHREADS * 2 + 1) and it executes very quickly, limited primarily by disk i/o. ZFS rocks on this thing, as does mysql/postgres or anything else that is happy with threads.

I do force multithreaded make jobs for ports, with 0 problems so far (not since mid-2011). I usually only see one thread getting hammered with older software that isn't thread aware. Usually load is split well.

The fact of the matter is that the future lies in more cpus with deeper c-states. It allows better power savings based on demand than two to four all-powerful cores. Even with deep c-states, the resolution for demand vs power saving is very low. I think the change will be very rapid as NUMA issues are resolved as well as software that is thread-averse gets fixed. There will always be software that benefits from one fast core more than many slower ones, but that pool of software is shrinking.

But like I said, I'm just as happy with my dual i7 (4 threads). It kills single threaded stuff, and most stuff is HT aware (FreeBSD is) so it doesn't bog down two fake cores on one die before giving jobs to the other die. But it doesn't have ECC, which is a downer. Personally for intel I really like the i3's that can run ECC in server boards. They're plenty fast for a file server or web server, and they run a consistent temperature as they don't have a "turbo" (AKA lava) mode.


----------



## zer0sig (Oct 24, 2012)

The real benefit in running Intel boards, in my experience, is that the BIOS and chipsets follow fairly rigorous rules that FreeBSD kernel/Xorg/etc developers usually only have to code for once. The chipsets for AMD chips have been varied and often have rather odd behaviors that may have to be fixed on a baord-by-board (or at least chipset-by-chipset) basis. Better chance of weird errors, heat issues, and AMD's performance is subpar at present. I'd like to see more parallel AMD systems and run FreeBSD on them, but they're just not here yet.

One note on the Intel G9xx series chipsets - there are some hardware acceleration support issues in 8.X - I'm dealing with them now on a Dell Studio 1745 with the notebook version of the G945 and acceleration is apparently not supported until 9.X. figuring on upgrading very soon to use that


----------



## ikbendeman (Jan 27, 2013)

Any opinions on the new 8 core amd fx?


----------

