Fedora Core 3 (2.6 kernel) was installed directly onto the SATA drives without any problems. Gigabit LAN, sound and USB were all automatically detected and properly configured. The only post installation hardware-related modification needed was to define the monitor. However, if you try to install something like RHL9 or FC1 (2.4 kernel), expect lots of problems with the SATA drive, LAN and sound configurations. Been there, done that. Save yourself a lot of headaches and load something with at least a 2.6 kernel.

All of the “permanently” installed hardware functioned properly under FC3. The system automounted, read-from and wrote-to a USB flash drive without any problems. Also, the USB flash drive appeared in the BIOS Removable Drives list along with the floppy drive and was selectable as a bootable device. So, if you want to do some fancy tricks, like writing your boot loader to a USB flash drive, be my guest.

With the exception of the connector location for the floppy drive and the presence of only two fan power connectors (none provided for power supply fan monitoring), this VIA-based motherboard is a nicely laid out motherboard. The addition of a dual-channel front side bus (FSB) with 4 memory slots is a nice improvement over previous Asus / VIA single-channel FSB motherboards. The BIOS are loaded with nice features, which are unfortunately, not well described in the manual.

One very nice BIOS feature is the ability to easily define the boot drives and their priority order, especially when it comes to selecting the PATA or the SATA drives as the primary boot drive. This may sound trivial, but I get tired of selecting an SATA drive as the BIOS boot drive, only to find out that Grub Stage-1 was written to the PATA drive MBR.

This feature is very useful for you dual-booters who want to set up WinXP on the SATA RAID-0 drive pair with Linux on the PATA drive(s). And just to be clear, the VIA software RAID is NOT currently supported by the 2.6 kernel (or at least it was not the last time I checked), so you will have to run the SATA drive(s) as non-RAID drives if you want to put Linux there, which is what I did. Of course, with the SATA drives set up as Linux Software Raid 0, the drives can be extremely fast. If you buy this board with SATA drives, you should really play with Linux Software Raid before you finalize your disk setup.

One interesting note for you overclockers is that lm_sensors-2.9.0 installed without any problems and provided voltage, fan speed, processor temperature and motherboard temperature information upon request. As the drivers are already built into the 2.6 kernel, all you have to do is just install lm_sensors and run the “sensors-detect” utility to configure the drivers. Well, there is a little more to it than that, and it is NOT a rpm-based installation, but you will get the idea.

The 5.1 surround sound via the S/PDIF output is of good quality, but you will want to install a good sound card if you are very serious about your sound or if you plan to use the system as part of a home theater setup. But to be fair, you really only notice the difference if you play another high quality 5.1 sound source through the same speaker system.

The chipset overrides the lock incorporated into Athlon XP processors and allows for overclocking without any physical modifications of the processor. There are numerous, very nice BIOS “jumpers” for overclocking this system by percentages, by clock multipliers and by actual frequencies. Also, one interesting feature is the ability to isolate the AGP frequency (“asynchronous” mode) from the system clock so as to avoid overclocking failures due to AGP failures.

With that said, my setup used an Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2 GHz) which could only be overclocked about 5% using the standard processor voltage. Even at that level, memtest86 reported about one error per full test cycle when overclocked 5% (2.3 GHz, FSB held at 400 MHz), but reported no errors when run at 2.2 GHz. There are reports of running a 3200+ at 2.6 GHz at elevated processor voltages, but I do not personally want an arc welder on my motherboard, so I have not toyed with the voltage. You can set the overclocking at 30% and watch it fly through the BIOS, but it will never boot and random lockups usually occur before the POST is completed.

And for you windows users, the board runs 98 and XP without any problems, although I am getting more and more reluctant to set up dual boot systems after having so many problems with FC2.

Major system components as assembled:

Asus A7V880 motherboard
2x512MB Micron MT16VDDT6464AG-40BC4 DIMMs
2xWestern Digital WD200JD SATA 200GB hard drives
1xWestern Digital WD200JB PATA 200GB hard drive
Asus V9520 TD video card (NVIDIA)

I only had a problem with the built on lan card. It didn't exactly come turned on like the first review said it did. The connect lights came on, but it didn't work right. I had to go to syskonnect's web site to get the latest driver patch and recompile the kernel. It was possible to patch the existing kernel, but what's the fun in that?

That was the only problem with this board. Highly advise geting this setup.