ASUS Motherboard Compatiblity?

English Hardware
1

Greetings All,

I am in the process of looking for a replacement Motherboard for my current system.

After a LOT of searching, it looks like the ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0 or ASUS M5A99X EVO have most of the features that I require:

  1. ECC support
  2. An RS232 port
  3. 6 (or more) SATA 3 ports.
  4. IEEE port (not essential as I CAN add a card if needed)

However, I have heard that there are issues running the newer MBs (UEFI BIOS) with Linux.

I currently boot multiple OSs, including SuSe 12.2, from a 1tb drive using GRUB (Legacy).
Suse Linux is my primary OS, but on occasion, I need to boot others (Windows/DOS/Linux)
I also use a number of removable/swapable SATA drives, none of which is greater than 2tb.
All drives are partitioned as MBR.
Most of my system usage involves databases and programming. I do very little game playing other than the occasional solitaire.

Will either of these MBs work? If not can someone recommend one that might fit my requirements?

Thanx in advance.

Rich

2

I use several ASUS motherboards and they all use a UEFI Setup instead of a traditional BIOS. My basic comment is if you stay away from using a GPT formatted drive as your boot drive for openSUSE or Windows, you are good to go for any purpose even though you have a UEFI PC. If you elect to boot openSUSE using a GPT disk, Windows BIOS boots will not work though mixing Linux versions may boot OK. In the end, unless forced to use GPT, stick with a MBR boot disk for openSUSE and Windows while you can still use a GPT formatted disk to hold data. A PC using a UEFI setup is required to beat the 2.2 Terabyte Limit for MBR disks, but you don’t have to boot from GPT unless you want to as MBR disks still work just fine. You can read more about the partition types here if you like:

Creating Partitions During Install for MBR and GPT Hard Disks: https://forums.opensuse.org/blogs/jdmcdaniel3/creating-partitions-during-install-mbr-gpt-hard-disks-122/

Thank You,

3

Using nothing but ASUS motherboards since approx. 10 years. The one and only that did not work was returned and replaced by ASUS within 24 hours, no charges at all. Never had any issues with drivers etc.

As James states, the real issue with new machines (in your case not the point) are the GPT disks. Met the first one this week, and had to convert it back to MBR using gdisk.