Gigabyte H61 boards compatible?

[Kevinnz]

New to the forums but have been running UT at three sites for some time now. Time has come to upgrade the hardware. Have been looking at a few Gigabyte boards to do the job; and was wondering if anybody had had any experience (hopefully happy) of any of these boards: GA-H61M-S2PV ;
GA-H61MA-D3V ; GA-H61N-USB3 ;
GA-B75M-D3H ; H77M-D3H.
Am planning on using a G850 2.9Ghz processor.
Feedback would be most welcome.

[Kevinnz]

Hopefully this will help someone else.

I used a H61M-S2PV Gigabyte board and it worked fine. Only issue was that one needs to ensure the SATA mode is set to AHCI otherwise it fails to detect the SATA CDROM drive (the board does not provide IDE connections). Apart from that, I stupidly used a Realtek 8139D which (as per gaziliions of posts) failed to detect. Will be collecting a Marvel based NIC tomorrow and I expect that will do the trick.

[Mathiau]

did a socket 1155 board with an i3 work fine, integrated video did not work though, i had to use an nvidia pcie card.

[Kevinnz]

Video on this board worked fine. The onboard network though is best left alone. Finer details:
BIOS
Set the PCI ROM Priority to Legacy
Disable the Network Stack
Disable other things that are not required (serial ports etc)
Use AHCI (not IDE - otherwise DVDROM does not work)
Disable the EHCI Handoff
(some of these settings quite honestly may make no difference, however, this is what worked)

Use two Network cards - (I would have used Intel cards if I could have got hold of them, but time was a problem so used used cards with Realtek 8169-32 chips - worked fine, but will probably replace them at next outage, dont waste your time trying to use 10/100 cards, I tried 4 diifferent types and none of them worked)

In service now and throughput looks good - so I guess its a pass.

It feels quite daunting having to build up something in a hurry and nothing seems to work, it seems the hardware architecture has overetaken Lenny to some extent. I am not in the know, but I guess server boards may be a lot more forgiving. Maybe we need one of the mainstream board makers to produce a line of desktop class boards that is certified for all the major Linux distributions. Maybe there is. Anyone know?

Hope this eases someones pain.