A7S333 mobo - MrRipley! What do you think?

[beet1e]

Wouldn't mind hearing from Mr. R, Bloom and funked on this...

I'm going to be building a new PC on which to do some Linux testing - including trying to run AH on the Linux platform. I don't want to spend bucketloads of cash, but this Asus A7S333 mobo is relatively well priced, and includes onboard audio, which should be good enough for my purposes. Just wondering what you guys think of the SiS ® 745 chipset.

[Reschke]

I don't have any experience with the current 745 chipset but previous chipsets for AMD that I have used from SiS have worked fine. I have a buddy that just bought that board and the A7V333 (Via chipset) from Asus and is going to decide which system he is going to give to his little brother. So far both are smooth and quick but he likes the tweaks that the A7V333 is over the SiS based A7S333. I am interested in seeing what others think because I may be getting myself a new CPU motherboard setup in the coming months.

[bloom25]

I haven't built a SiS chipset based system and I don't know if Linux drivers are available for them.  Generally SiS chipsets are fairly reliable, but tend to lag somewhat in performance behind other chipsets available.

I have used nForce based boards recently, and there are Linux drivers for them at nVidia's site (though I haven't tried Linux on them).  If the drivers work correctly under Linux you can build a very inexpensive system with the 420D chipsets with integrated GF 2 Mx, great onboard sound, and often integrated ethernet as well.  My current system uses the Asus A7N266-C board, which uses the 415 chipset.  This means it does not have the onboard video and this particular board does not have integrated ethernet either.