MSI RS482M4-ILD (Radeon Xpress 200 chipset)
Henrik Carlqvist
nice on paper as it is m-ATX and has built in graphics with DVI out.
However, all computers that I have built before has had intel motherboard
chipsets so this Radeon motherboard chipset is unfamiliar to me. A few
questions:
Will IDE dma work with kernel 2.4.31? Does it work with a 2.6 kernel?
Is DRI supported by the opensource drivers in X.org? According to
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/radeon.4.html it seems to work, but
I have seen other pages saying that it is untested. Will the DVI port work
with the opensource drivers? At least with earlier versions of X.org I
have had problems to get the DVI port to work with Radeon 9250 cards.
Does the built in sound work fine with ALSA?
I suppose that the built in USB and firewire ports work?
I have not found much about this board on google. That could mean that
there are no problems or that the board and chipset is not very common.
regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc8(at)uthyres.com Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
ro...@variousus.net root@localhost
John-Paul Stewart
> I'm thinking about building a small computer and the MSI RS482M4-ILD seems
> nice on paper as it is m-ATX and has built in graphics with DVI out.
> However, all computers that I have built before has had intel motherboard
> chipsets so this Radeon motherboard chipset is unfamiliar to me. A few
> questions:
>
> Will IDE dma work with kernel 2.4.31? Does it work with a 2.6 kernel?
I don't have hands on experience with that board, but I do know that
there were big driver updates in 2.6.11 for that chipset. Others report
that DMA works with recent kernels. (There is at least some support for
the chipset in the 2.4 series from 2.4.26 on, but I don't know how well
it works.)
[snip]
> Does the built in sound work fine with ALSA?
Apparently, yes.
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=vendor-ATI#matrix
Vladimir Florinski
> I'm thinking about building a small computer and the MSI RS482M4-ILD seems
> nice on paper as it is m-ATX and has built in graphics with DVI out.
> However, all computers that I have built before has had intel motherboard
> chipsets so this Radeon motherboard chipset is unfamiliar to me. A few
> questions:
>
> Will IDE dma work with kernel 2.4.31? Does it work with a 2.6 kernel?
>
> Is DRI supported by the opensource drivers in X.org? According to
> http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/radeon.4.html it seems to work, but
> I have seen other pages saying that it is untested. Will the DVI port work
> with the opensource drivers? At least with earlier versions of X.org I
> have had problems to get the DVI port to work with Radeon 9250 cards.
>
> Does the built in sound work fine with ALSA?
>
> I suppose that the built in USB and firewire ports work?
>
> I have not found much about this board on google. That could mean that
> there are no problems or that the board and chipset is not very common.
ATI is not perceived as a viable Linux platform, so it is no surprise that
this chipset is rarely used. I recommend a similar NVidia-based board
from MSI (K8NGM2-FID, GeForce 6150 chipset) which is guaranteed to work
with any modern distribution.
--
Vladimir
Mark Baker
works fine with Windows, although if you ever want to go to 4GB of
memory, it won't work even with a 64-bit OS; the chipset consumes
address space in the 3-4 GB range and doesn't support remapping.
Personally, I would recommend the nVidia nForce4 series chipsets. I
just built a Fedora 5 system around an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum, and the
Fedora installer recognized ALL of the hardware with absolutely no
problems at all. In all honesty, it was an easier install than Windows.
Of course, it doesn't have integrated video, but you can pick up an
nVidia GeForce 6-series card these days for under $100, and the nVidia
driver is available as a Fedora RPM from livna.org; that was a
no-brainer too - I'm using an eVGA 6800XT.
Mark
Henrik Carlqvist
> ATI is not perceived as a viable Linux platform, so it is no surprise that
> this chipset is rarely used. I recommend a similar NVidia-based board
> from MSI (K8NGM2-FID, GeForce 6150 chipset) which is guaranteed to work
> with any modern distribution.
You are not the only one recomending nVidia motherboard chipset instead of
ATI. However, if I choose nVidia built in graphics I know for sure that
DRI is not going to work with the opensource nv driver. Instead of
replacing ATI with nVidia I would rather choose a motherboard with a
via unichrome or intel built in graphics. Maybe I should do a safe choice
and go for an intel chipset, but that also means that I will have to go
for an intel CPU. There are many mini-ITX boards with VIA unichrome
chipset, but I haven't found any mini-ITX board or micro-ATX with
unichrome chipset and a DVI port.
Henrik Carlqvist
> I have a Windows machine running on an ASUS mobo with that chipset. It
> works fine with Windows, although if you ever want to go to 4GB of
> memory, it won't work even with a 64-bit OS; the chipset consumes
> address space in the 3-4 GB range and doesn't support remapping.
I have seen that phenomena on an opteron machine with AMD chipset also.
The machine has 4 GB but can only use about 3.5 GB. In the new machine
that I am planning I am only going to have 1 or 2 GB so that will not be
a problem.
> Personally, I would recommend the nVidia nForce4 series chipsets. I
> just built a Fedora 5 system around an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum,
...
> Of course, it doesn't have integrated video, but you can pick up an
> nVidia GeForce 6-series card these days for under $100, and the nVidia
> driver is available as a Fedora RPM from livna.org; that was a
> no-brainer too - I'm using an eVGA 6800XT.
I don't mind to have an nVidia motherboard chipset. However, for external
graphics cards I prefer those ATI cards that have opensource drivers with
working DRI. The planned machine is supposed to be small and quiet and
doesn't have to be that powerful, therefore integrated graphics is
prefered for that one.
Miguel De Anda
> Vladimir Florinski <vflo...@ucr.edu> wrote:
>> ATI is not perceived as a viable Linux platform, so it is no surprise
>> that this chipset is rarely used. I recommend a similar NVidia-based
>> board from MSI (K8NGM2-FID, GeForce 6150 chipset) which is guaranteed to
>> work with any modern distribution.
>
> You are not the only one recomending nVidia motherboard chipset instead of
> ATI. However, if I choose nVidia built in graphics I know for sure that
> DRI is not going to work with the opensource nv driver. Instead of
> replacing ATI with nVidia I would rather choose a motherboard with a
> via unichrome or intel built in graphics. Maybe I should do a safe choice
> and go for an intel chipset, but that also means that I will have to go
> for an intel CPU. There are many mini-ITX boards with VIA unichrome
> chipset, but I haven't found any mini-ITX board or micro-ATX with
> unichrome chipset and a DVI port.
>
> regards Henrik
Is there any reason in particular you can't use the closed source drivers?
Nvidia drivers are nice and seem to always work. I have that video chipset
on my laptop and the ati drivers seem to be very bad and my laptop crashes
quiet often if I try to do any 3d stuff... sometimes just the video display
goes black-white... (I just made up that term for when my display goes
black, but the backlight goes to 1000% brighness). Of course I'm using the
closed source drivers for that.
I've got a nehemiah 10000 board with the unichrome chipset but I've never
managed to get acceleration to work on it. I hardly use it though, but I
really need acceleration on it.. even if its just 2d. I'm using slackware
and wouldn't want to move to fedora (or whatever their drivers are built
for, source drivers seem to be a pain to setup)
Just my two cents.
*** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ***
Henrik Carlqvist
> Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
>> if I choose nVidia built in graphics I know for sure that DRI is not
>> going to work with the opensource nv driver. Instead of replacing ATI
>> with nVidia I would rather choose a motherboard with a via unichrome or
>> intel built in graphics.
> Is there any reason in particular you can't use the closed source
> drivers?
Except that they taint my kernel with all that means I have also some bad
experiences from machines with nVidia binary drivers. I have seen machines
hang completely when OpenGL programs are used. I have one machine at work
with an nVidia card which needs the binary driver to use a dual screen.
That machine often gives some strange segfaults when trying to run KDE.
This happens both on the local console and when logging in with xdmcp. Out
of about 30 machines this is the only one having problems and the only
thing that makes it differ from other machines is that it has a dual
screen and runs the nVidia driver. I have tried memtest86 without finding
any errors on the machine. I suspect the binary driver, but without the
source I am unable to debug it, I can only hope that a newer version of
the driver is going to fix the problems one day.
> Nvidia drivers are nice and seem to always work.
The binary drivers are good enough for a home gaming system. However, in
my experience they are not good enough for a server which is supposed to
be up 24/7 with local and remote users logged in from the network. It is
not OK if such a machine hangs once a month.
> I have that video chipset on my laptop and the ati drivers seem to be
> very bad and my laptop crashes quiet often if I try to do any 3d
> stuff... sometimes just the video display goes black-white... (I just
> made up that term for when my display goes black, but the backlight goes
> to 1000% brighness). Of course I'm using the closed source drivers for
> that.
So you have the Xpress 200 chipset? Are there any particular reason that
you use the closed source driver? Doesn't DRI work with the opensource
radeon or r300 driver? I agree that the ATI binary driver is a lot worse
than the nVidia binary driver.
> I've got a nehemiah 10000 board with the unichrome chipset but I've
> never managed to get acceleration to work on it. I hardly use it though,
> but I really need acceleration on it.. even if its just 2d. I'm using
> slackware and wouldn't want to move to fedora (or whatever their drivers
> are built for, source drivers seem to be a pain to setup)
Been there, done that. About a year ago I followed the steps in the VIA
Unichrome and DRI HOWTO at
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=26963&group_id=102048
So I have DRI working on Unichrome. However, I haven't used it enough to
be able to tell if it is stable. The main feature on my unichrome machine
is xvmc as it is supposed to be used as a PVR.
> Just my two cents.
Thanks for your input. If it turns out that the Xpress 200 based board
from MSI is a bad choice I am now considering an AOpen i945GTm-VHL.
However, that motherboard costs about 3 times as much as the MSI board. It
also requires more expensive SO-DIMM and intel core (duo) CPU. Such a
system will probably end up at least twice as expensive and with less
performance than an Athlon 3000+ based system.
Henrik Carlqvist
> I don't have hands on experience with that board, but I do know that
> there were big driver updates in 2.6.11 for that chipset. Others report
> that DMA works with recent kernels. (There is at least some support for
> the chipset in the 2.4 series from 2.4.26 on, but I don't know how well
> it works.)
Thanks, that probably means that the board has potential to be fully
supported one day. It would be nice to hear from someone with own
experiences from the board. Even though others have adviced me to get
another chipset I am still tempted to try this board.
Vladimir Florinski
> Miguel De Anda <mig...@thedeanda.com> wrote:
>> Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
>>> if I choose nVidia built in graphics I know for sure that DRI is not
>>> going to work with the opensource nv driver. Instead of replacing ATI
>>> with nVidia I would rather choose a motherboard with a via unichrome or
>>> intel built in graphics.
>
>> Is there any reason in particular you can't use the closed source
>> drivers?
>
> Except that they taint my kernel with all that means I have also some bad
> experiences from machines with nVidia binary drivers. I have seen machines
> hang completely when OpenGL programs are used. I have one machine at work
> with an nVidia card which needs the binary driver to use a dual screen.
> That machine often gives some strange segfaults when trying to run KDE.
> This happens both on the local console and when logging in with xdmcp.
It must be a KDE bug (and you shouldn't be using xdm anyway). In my
department, where I set hardware policies, use of opensource video drivers
is strongly discouraged (with the exception of laptops, where Nvidia
doesn't have a large presence). Opensource drivers are amateurish, of poor
quality and performance, crash often, break on updates, and it's hard to
get bugs fixed or receive help from developers. Nvidia drivers are written
by professionals, virtually never crash (and when there is a problem,
it is easy to report to NVidia and the fix is usually available in the
next update), and have excellent performance. That has been my experience
with dozens of systems. The only ones that crashed had ATI, Matrox, and
Intel cards running opensource drivers.
> Out
> of about 30 machines this is the only one having problems and the only
> thing that makes it differ from other machines is that it has a dual
> screen and runs the nVidia driver. I have tried memtest86 without finding
> any errors on the machine. I suspect the binary driver, but without the
> source I am unable to debug it, I can only hope that a newer version of
> the driver is going to fix the problems one day.
You would not be able to debug it even if you had the source (and nobody
would except Nvidia engineers). The driver is more complex than the kernel
and there is simply no talent or experience within the opensource
community to understand the code (much less develop an equivalent driver).
>
>> Nvidia drivers are nice and seem to always work.
>
> The binary drivers are good enough for a home gaming system. However, in
> my experience they are not good enough for a server which is supposed to
> be up 24/7 with local and remote users logged in from the network. It is
> not OK if such a machine hangs once a month.
I am not talking about servers here. These can be run without video cards
at all.
Well, if opensource is your religion, you should expect to pay more. I do
have the Intel 945 chipset in my laptop, and its 3D performance is abysmal
with the i810 driver. Actually, its software rendering speed (tested with
vesafb) was better than hardware rendering!
--
Vladimir
Henrik Carlqvist
>> That machine often gives some strange segfaults when trying to run KDE.
>> This happens both on the local console and when logging in with xdmcp.
>
> It must be a KDE bug (and you shouldn't be using xdm anyway).
I have 30+ machines where KDE works without any problems at all. This is
the only machine with those segfaults. My guess is that the driver, or
rather the nvidia libraries are involved in the bug as that is the only
thing that makes this machine differ from others.
I am aware that xdm logins send clear text passwords. However, this is on
a secure net with trusted users and the network doesn't even have a
connection to internet.
> In my department, where I set hardware policies, use of opensource video
> drivers is strongly discouraged (with the exception of laptops, where
> Nvidia doesn't have a large presence).
Does this policy apply also to drivers for other peripherals like SCSI
cards and network cards?
> Opensource drivers are amateurish, of poor quality and performance,
> crash often, break on updates, and it's hard to get bugs fixed or
> receive help from developers.
If that is your experience it might explain your policy, but I have the
opposite experience.
> Nvidia drivers are written by professionals, virtually never crash (and
> when there is a problem, it is easy to report to NVidia and the fix is
> usually available in the next update), and have excellent performance.
I agree that the drivers have very good performance. However, I find it
much easier to report or even fix bugs myself in an opensource driver.
With access to the driver source it is possible to add trace printouts to
find out where the driver hangs. How useful is a bugreport which only says:
"A machine with distro X and kernel Y with your driver version Z hanged
last night. After reboot there were no traces in the logs, probably
because the file system wasn't flushed at the hang. The screen was blank
when I came, the hang might have been caused by an OpenGL screen saver".
I have never even bothered to send such a bug report.
Being a developer myself, I know that almost every developer wants to
write perfect software. However, working as a professional developer means
that you have some kind of boss which means that your time means money and
his task is to stop your work when the software is good enough. Fixing the
last rare bugs costs too much money.
> That has been my experience with dozens of systems. The only ones that
> crashed had ATI, Matrox, and Intel cards running opensource drivers.
At work I have by default the environment variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT
set for all users. This disables DRI. The reason for this is that without
that I had at least one machine with a Matrox card crashing every month,
mostly because of some randomly selected screen saver, but it could also
be Matlab or some custom application. Users which need DRI are able to
temporary unset the environment variable for their application.
So I share your experience that the Matrox opensource driver isn't really
stable. However, in my experience also the nVidia binary driver crashes
about as often as the Matrox cards. At home I have a low end ATI card. I
don't have that environment variable set as I feel no need for it. I have
seen maybe one or two crashes with this card in about two years, but thats
OK for a home system. Current uptime on my home system is more than 100
days.
> You would not be able to debug it even if you had the source (and nobody
> would except Nvidia engineers). The driver is more complex than the
> kernel and there is simply no talent or experience within the opensource
> community to understand the code (much less develop an equivalent
> driver).
By adding some trace printouts it would be rather easy to find where it
hangs. However, once the location of the crash is found it might not be as
easy to produce a fix, but at least it would be possible to produce an
informative bug report.
>> The binary drivers are good enough for a home gaming system. However,
>> in my experience they are not good enough for a server which is
>> supposed to be up 24/7 with local and remote users logged in from the
>> network. It is not OK if such a machine hangs once a month.
>
> I am not talking about servers here. These can be run without video
> cards at all.
This depends upon what kind of server you mean. Servers for web, mail and
NFS could be run without video card. However, we have some powerful
machines which are used both as login servers for users on network to run
simulations and also local users which need both CPU and GPU performance.
>> Thanks for your input. If it turns out that the Xpress 200 based board
>> from MSI is a bad choice I am now considering an AOpen i945GTm-VHL.
>> However, that motherboard costs about 3 times as much as the MSI board.
>> It also requires more expensive SO-DIMM and intel core (duo) CPU. Such
>> a system will probably end up at least twice as expensive and with less
>> performance than an Athlon 3000+ based system.
> Well, if opensource is your religion, you should expect to pay more. I
> do have the Intel 945 chipset in my laptop, and its 3D performance is
> abysmal with the i810 driver. Actually, its software rendering speed
> (tested with vesafb) was better than hardware rendering!
That was one interesting test. I also appreciate your advice on the
K8NGM2-FID, however, as you understand by now I prefer another chipset
than nVidia for graphics. If I would be building a machine with a high end
card with maximum graphics performance nothing would performace-wise be
able to match a high-end nVidia card like 7900 with binary drivers.
However, as I am now building a low-end machine I am able to choose among
cards with opensource drivers and with that option I prefer the opensource
alternative. If someone with own experiences of the RS482M4-ILD shared
them my decision would be easy. The RS482M4-ILD is even a little more
cheaper than the K8NGM2-FID, but I don't want to buy it unless I know it
works OK.
M.Kmann
> ...
> doesn't have a large presence). Opensource drivers are amateurish, of poor
> quality and performance, crash often, break on updates, and it's hard to
> get bugs fixed or receive help from developers. Nvidia drivers are written
> by professionals, virtually never crash (and when there is a problem,
bad experiences in childhood? I agree that a lot of good open-source
developers are employed now and dont have much time left for community
tasks. but a few of the tough guys remain out there and still work very
professoinal!
In my opinion all the (ex-)windows programers which switched in the last
years to linux and don't (want to) know anything about kernel and / or
unix standards produced often very poor code. alas their number grows
because the beginning is too easy; like "hey, today I write a new driver
for my usb webcam, where is the kernel-source?".
these "new" programmers think that they don't have to learn much and so
they can spill projects. KDE was an example of such a process two years ago.
bug reporting with open-source projects (especially those running
bugzilla pages :-) is easy for programmers.
Henrik Carlqvist
> I have not found much about this board on google.
Now I found a rather good page at http://blog.larcun.com/?p=18
The blog author really has some bad experience from a motherboard with the
same chipset. However, others seem to have been more lucky with the MSI
RS482M-IL. My guess is that it doesn't differ much from the RS482M4-ILD so
I hope that these experiences will apply also to that board.
The other board that seems to get better recommendations on that page,
K8MM3-V, doesn't have any DVI output. Nor have I been able to find
any other motherboard with K8M800 chipset that has DVI.
Henrik Carlqvist
> I'm thinking about building a small computer and the MSI RS482M4-ILD seems
> nice on paper as it is m-ATX and has built in graphics with DVI out.
> However, all computers that I have built before has had intel motherboard
> chipsets so this Radeon motherboard chipset is unfamiliar to me. A few
> questions:
I ended up buing this board anyway and now I am able to answer my own
questions as I have installed Slackware 10.2 on the box.
> Will IDE dma work with kernel 2.4.31?
No, DMA didn't work with the PATA HD or the PATA DVD+-RW with 2.4.31.
> Does it work with a 2.6 kernel?
Yes, DMA did work both for HD and DVD with 2.6.13 which was included as
test26.s in the testing directory with Slackware.
> Is DRI supported by the opensource drivers in X.org? According to
> http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/radeon.4.html it seems to work, but
> I have seen other pages saying that it is untested. Will the DVI port work
> with the opensource drivers? At least with earlier versions of X.org I
> have had problems to get the DVI port to work with Radeon 9250 cards.
Maybe DRI does work with a more up to date X.org. I don't know. Slackware
10.2 include X.org 6.8.2 and that ATI driver does not work at all. Instead
I am now using the vesa driver. One day I might upgrade X.org...
> Does the built in sound work fine with ALSA?
No, so far I have not been able to get any sounds from this machine. The
alsa modules are loaded, alsamixer works and all channels are unmuted
except the PCM channel which does not seem possible to mute. However I
have not yet been able to get any sounds from the built in sound card.
> I suppose that the built in USB and firewire ports work?
I can confirm that the USB ports work, but I haven't tried firewire. I can
only see that firewire modules get loaded.
It was rather problematic to get the machine working. At first the network
and the DVD refused to work, probably because they couldn't agree if an
IRQ was shared and if it should be flank or level trigged. "pci=noacpi"
cured this problem. The network chipset really seems unable to share IRQ
with anything else. When the only com-port was set to COM1: (ttyS0) with
IRQ 4 the network which shared that interrupt died again. The only com
port had to be configured as COM2: (ttyS1).
At the moment, I would not recomend this card to anyone else. Maybe it
will work better in a few years when drivers have matured. But by then the
card will probably no longer be on the market.
Peter D.
[big snip]
Thanks for the review. It is a pity that there is no central
repository for this type of thing.
--
Peter D.
Sig goes here...