> 
> I'm going to be buying a 200MHz Pentium Pro and motherboard (probably
> a dual-CPU) in the next week or two.  I know the Orion chipset has
> some nasty bugs (like the 4MB/s PCI bus speed).
> 
> Has anyone discovered any horrible bugs in the Natoma (440FX) chipset,
> or is it working well so far?
> 
> I also remember reading something about someone having quality
> problems with SuperMicro motherboards.  Any opinions on SuperMicro
> versus ASUS, WRT build quality, reliability, support, and speed?

I just got a Tyan Titan Pro 200MHz 440FX at work, and so far everthing seems 
to work Just Fine. With EDO DRAM, the memory bandwidth shows quite an 
improvement over the Orion chipset (I get 211 MB/s to main memory for reads, 
compared to 160 MB/s on a Fast-Page-DRAM Orion). The write bandwidth still 
suffers on the Pro even with the new chipset; the best I can get is 68 MB/s, 
compared to 82 MB/s on a Triton-based Pentium. But it is an improvement over 
the Orion machines (50 MB/s writing).

The other benchmarks I've run (my own derivatives of lmbench) have indicated 
no big problems, but I've done very little I/O testing, so I can't comment on 
PCI.

I've had no other problems yet--its a nice machine :-)

If you get an Award BIOS, do some benchmarking to determine the best settings 
of the BIOS advanced chipset options. the "Fast DRAM refresh" option, for 
example, cuts the read bandwidth by a factor of 2.

--Aaron