Vetting motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

[ThinkDifferently]

I'm currently looking for an ATX motherboard that supports the AM2+ socket, Phenom Quad-Core processor, 4 DDR2 RAM slots (800 MHz is fine), 6 SATA ports with RAID, and Gigabit LAN.  Onboard VGA would be nice.

It needs to work well with FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, using a 2-disk SATA RAID1.

I'm currently looking at the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H.

Has anyone successfully operated 7.0 on this board?
Any booting issues?  Did you need to modify the ISO to get it to boot (if so how)?
Did RAID work?  Did it require a special driver to be loaded (if so how)?

Do any other motherboards fit the bill, given the specifications I give above?

I recently got a black eye  with the MSI K9N2G Neo-FD, using the GeForce 8200 (MCP78) chipset.  FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and CentOS 5.2 wouldn't even boot on it, no matter what the BIOS config was.  Also, Vista wouldn't even recognize the SATA disks, even if the SATA ports were in IDE, RAID or AHCI modes (it requires a driver, even if you aren't doing RAID).

Also, I do not need HTPC quality video and sound from this thing.  I know the mobo I mentioned has HTPC written all over it, but it's the base qualities (processor, chipset, SATA, etc.) that really count.

All I need is basic VGA, and some stereo sound wouldn't be too bad.  I don't really care if accelerated video or theater-quality sound output was bad or flaky.

I'm going to operate it as a server and plug it into a VGA KVM that has a max resolution of 1024x768.

[ThinkDifferently]

ThinkDifferently wrote:

I'm currently looking at the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H.

I'd like to update everyone that the above motherboard does in fact work with FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE.  The onboard Ethernet port (chipset 8111C) will not work with 7.0.  The updated driver is in 7.1.

Everything works great, except this mobo has a software RAID driver, which FreeBSD does not support.  So, you would have to do standalone disks or some other kind of volume management, like vinum, I suppose.

All in all, it's very fast and easy to use.  I just regret that it doesn't natively support hardware RAID.  I splurged and got a RocketRAID 3120 card, but I'm currently struggling in that regard to get it to boot after the installation.
See thread...
http://www.nabble.com/How-do-I-use-RocketRAID-3120-with-FreeBSD-7.1-RELEASE-----tt21471603.html
I originally posted it in the FreeBSD-Drivers list, because I'm trying to figure out how to use the hptiop driver, included in FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE.