Good News: Great motherboard to run Mandrake 10 on. Onboard Gigabit LAN was detected on install. Hyperthreaded CPU was detected which enabled an additional multiprocessing selection in the LILO boot menu.

Not so good news: Onboard AD1985 sound was detected but I was not able to get it to work with ALSA. I even tried installing the Intel sound drivers from their website with no success. The good news is I got the onboard sound to work using the OSS drivers which I downloaded from www.opensound.com.

I would have given this board a 10 if only the native Intel sound drivers worked. It is a great board to run Linux on after you get the sound to work.

One thing I like about this board is its provision for 3 fan headers (in addition to the CPU fan header) which you can connect your fans to. The motherboard controls the speed depending on the sensors built in the motherboard. As a result, the fans are rotating slowly most of the time making for a very quiet PC.