I can comment on my experiences with the 740G chipset, Fedora 9, AMD 5000+ and a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 motherboard.
Install was a little rough, as whatever driver was being auto selected would give a black screen and lock me out of the system. I tried text install and that worked, but playing with radeonhd (xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd-1.2.1-3.7.20080724git.fc9.x86_64.rpm) would allow me to login once. If I would exit the session, I would get a solid black screen that no amount of switching screens would bypass. Even during the active session I was logged into, lockups were fairly common with multimedia (xv and x11 under mplayer).
I went to the 'ole stable vesa driver for a while, and that worked OK. My prior setup was a 9250 with the radeon driver, and a P4 1.6Ghz. Vesa might be slow, but with the 5000+ and 2 gigs of ram, I was able to play video using the x11 driver with mplayer. The only issue that I was having was that vesa doesn't like widescreen monitors (video bios presets or something). My 1440x900 display was showing a squashed 1440x1050 screen. While functional, it was difficult to look at.
I crossed my fingers and changed over to the radeon driver, and it seems to work right now. I'm still using x11 and mplayer (Haven't had the courage to try xv yet). I have not had a lockup to date and I am able to exit the session and return to gdm with no issues.
I don't like to text mode install under Fedora 9. My recommendation to anyone installing on a 740G mb is to disable the onboard video in the bios set the mb to boot from PCI, power down the machine, and add an old PCI video card for install. Once all is set, you can switch to the vesa (or radeon) driver, set the bios back to the 740G, remove the card, and restart the machine. I tried this on a re-install and it seemed to work much better.
Overall, I'm quite happy with the 740G; I might not be so happy with a slower processor, but it suits my 2D desktop work fine. I'm hoping the radeonhd driver will update soon to include better support for the 740G.
I'd be interested in feeback from other 740G operators. I'm always looking to improve my setup.
For those interested, pulseaudio didn't seem to like the hda-intel Realtek ALC888. Alsa worked fine by adding the lines to /etc/modprobe.conf:
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
Some things in my xorg.conf file were from trying to get vesa to display 1440x900 instead of 1440x1050. The xorg site explained that my efforts were futile, of course. My xorg.conf is:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "yes"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1440x900"
DisplaySize 381 238
HorizSync 31.5 - 100.0
VertRefresh 59.0 - 75.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Card"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
Driver "radeon"
Option "BusType" "PCI"
Option "Panelsize" "1400x900"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"
Option "UseFBDev" "1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Card"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900" "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Install was a little rough, as whatever driver was being auto selected would give a black screen and lock me out of the system. I tried text install and that worked, but playing with radeonhd (xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd-1.2.1-3.7.20080724git.fc9.x86_64.rpm) would allow me to login once. If I would exit the session, I would get a solid black screen that no amount of switching screens would bypass. Even during the active session I was logged into, lockups were fairly common with multimedia (xv and x11 under mplayer).
I went to the 'ole stable vesa driver for a while, and that worked OK. My prior setup was a 9250 with the radeon driver, and a P4 1.6Ghz. Vesa might be slow, but with the 5000+ and 2 gigs of ram, I was able to play video using the x11 driver with mplayer. The only issue that I was having was that vesa doesn't like widescreen monitors (video bios presets or something). My 1440x900 display was showing a squashed 1440x1050 screen. While functional, it was difficult to look at.
I crossed my fingers and changed over to the radeon driver, and it seems to work right now. I'm still using x11 and mplayer (Haven't had the courage to try xv yet). I have not had a lockup to date and I am able to exit the session and return to gdm with no issues.
I don't like to text mode install under Fedora 9. My recommendation to anyone installing on a 740G mb is to disable the onboard video in the bios set the mb to boot from PCI, power down the machine, and add an old PCI video card for install. Once all is set, you can switch to the vesa (or radeon) driver, set the bios back to the 740G, remove the card, and restart the machine. I tried this on a re-install and it seemed to work much better.
Overall, I'm quite happy with the 740G; I might not be so happy with a slower processor, but it suits my 2D desktop work fine. I'm hoping the radeonhd driver will update soon to include better support for the 740G.
I'd be interested in feeback from other 740G operators. I'm always looking to improve my setup.
For those interested, pulseaudio didn't seem to like the hda-intel Realtek ALC888. Alsa worked fine by adding the lines to /etc/modprobe.conf:
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
Some things in my xorg.conf file were from trying to get vesa to display 1440x900 instead of 1440x1050. The xorg site explained that my efforts were futile, of course. My xorg.conf is:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "yes"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1440x900"
DisplaySize 381 238
HorizSync 31.5 - 100.0
VertRefresh 59.0 - 75.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Card"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
Driver "radeon"
Option "BusType" "PCI"
Option "Panelsize" "1400x900"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"
Option "UseFBDev" "1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Card"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900" "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection
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