Good point. While it would be quite easy to add FireWire support through a PCI card, it sure would be nice to have support for it native to the motherboard.
The problem with the MSI K9N is that the Northbridge's passive cooler is said to get very, VERY hot, which might be problematic in our application as noise (and therefore airflow) needs to be minimized.
I haven't tested it personally though, but every review I read on the K9N seems to mention the heat issue. That's why I liked the Abit board in the first place; passively cooled, but with heat pipes and an easy way out for the heat.
I guess we would need to test such a board in our "harsh" environment to know if it could survive there.
Simon Labrecque
-----Original Message----- From: Vlad C. [mailto:vladc6@yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 11:23 AM To: linuxbios@linuxbios.org; agarwal@videotron.ca Subject: Re: Support for recent chipset and powerful desktop CPU
Suggestions:
- Asus M2N-E
(http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&l3=308&model=1181...
=2)
- MSI K9N Platinum
(http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UI
D=730)
Simon,
The MSI K9N Platinum motherboard has an IEEE1394 (FireWire) chipset, while the Asus M2N-E does not. You mentioned earlier that you're designing a PVR/MediaCenter PC -- lots of consumer devices such as cable boxes and digital cameras use FireWire to transfer images and video. MythTV can use FireWire[1] and according to Wikipedia almost all modern digital camcorders have included this connection since 1995. [2]
I think the MSI K9N Platinum motherboard would therefore be better suited for a Multimedia PC.
Vlad
[1] http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/FireWire [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire
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