In message <E16IJBR-000Kf5-0V@anchor-post-31.mail.demon.net>, Graham/Aniartia w
rites:
>> i815 based motherboard looks stable for me and fast .

>Why go for an Intel CPU? They're expencive & slow.

Because most of the AMD-friendly motherboards have VIA chipsets.

What's wrong with those?  How shall I count the ways:
* At BSDi, I spent a couple of calendar months (figure a total of 4+ working
  days, solid) trying to debug a customer's problem with serial ports that
  would, every so often, just stop delivering interrupts.  The problem?  VIA
  chipset; he replaced the board with an Intel chipset-based board, and it
  got better.
* I have one motherboard that will, every couple of months, lose the ability
  to see hard drives after a boot, until it's been powered down for at least
  two hours.  VIA chipset.
* I had (I returned it) a motherboard where NetBSD would, 100% reliably,
  see the first key you pressed after boot as held down indefinitely until
  you unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in.  VIA chipset.
* The Abit VP6 says it supports ECC, but it doesn't.  VIA chipset.
* One of the motherboards I have used to start doing the "I have no valid
  video card" thing after about three boots, until you removed the video
  card and replaced it.  This did only happen with one specific model of
  video card - but it also only happened with this motherboard.  VIA chipset.
* I used to have a motherboard that couldn't even boot with a 5GB drive
  installed, no matter what it was jumpered as, or how you set the BIOS up.
  VIA chipset.
* I have returned at least one or two other motherboards for humorous or
  implausible failings - all with VIA chipsets.

By contrast, I have had the following problems with Intel-based chipsets:
* A machine was dropped 15', such that, after shearing off its mounting
  screws, the drive cage nearly cut the SCSI cable in two.  A year or so
  later, the board spent two hours plugged in, sans surge protection, to an
  outlet that was wobbling between 0 and 60v AC, such that the power supply
  made a very strange humming sound and a bit of a burning rubber spell.
  After this, the board stopped working.

Now, to be fair, the i810 and i815 chipsets don't support ECC - but they
somehow seem to have avoided the problem where vendors go around claiming
they do.

I'm not saying that VIA chipsets are cheap pieces of crap; I'm just saying
that every last single one I've ever had to deal with generally has been.
I was convinced to try a recent Tyan board that has some AMD parts, and some
VIA parts, and it looks like it's a lot better; they may only suck at some
parts of this, or AMD may have whipped them at least partially into shape,
but the sheer ubiquity of their insanely weird falure modes has me pretty
much convinced that, if I'm going to try to build a reliable machine, I'm
going to avoid things that are based on VIA chipsets.

So, yes, I'll take slightly worse Intel CPU's if it gets me a motherboard
chipset with decent performance.

While we're at it, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish devoutly that
I could find a board with a ServerWorks chipset that did Athlons.  I have used
a number of ServerWorks chipsets, and indeed, their HE-SL chipset just sold me
a couple of computers - because the computers *I* built for trying to run
gigabit networking could actually saturate a local area gigabit LAN, and
someone else's couldn't.  :)  (I'm quite happy to say that apparently the
current record for *WAN* connections with those boxes is a bit over 600Mb/s.)

-s