First off I don't use recommended RAM, I use a 512 stick of value ram from corsair and a 512 stick of basic ram from mushkin.

I also managed to have a few sparks and a fire inside the case so far. First a screw hit my sound chipset while I was installing it and that threw a few sparks(It was running, I was just trying to screw the card in) and my sound has never worked(I have a SB audigy 2 anyways). My fire was when my speaker grounded because I had to take it out of the cases holding spot and it ended up on the ground when I turned it on so I kicked it on accident and it grounded on my case and sizzled the wire.
I havn't had the best of luck but the board still works well.

I had some random crashing problems that I am no longer experiencing. I suggest configuring your IRQs somewhat manually at least for the PCI cards because it crashed when a ton of the things were on shared IRQs but runs okay now that they're not(no true example of this but it's what I see so far).
Sound blaster audigy 2 needs to have it's IRQ set otherwise you will probably have your computer randomly crash if you have sound playing.

In closing:
the motherboard will work just fine and i'm happy with it. The lan drivers are actually easy to install, however they don't explain how to get them to load every time you boot(that only takes a quick search if you don't know how).

Try to use the recomended ram.

DO NOT use a 1800+ in the board, it caused nothing but problems untill I could buy my 2600+ that runs fine. I think it had to do with the default settings.

Be ready to swap some cards around and set IRQs if you experience lockups.

All in all I do actually like the motherboard for the cost. Also, with all the complaints about the nForce2 chipset I hear I think I'm plenty happy with this via.

Cons:
no SATA driver(I'm taking the original posters word for it)
not totally plug and play(you will probably have to screw around in bios some.

I'd give it a ten if it had sata support

I've not used the integrated Lan as the only drivers I can find are for 2.4.xx and I have yet to even try hooking up speakers or sound (I simply have not needed them, however a review I have read told me there are no linux drivers, I cannot confirm this).

This board is very nice for the price, with a 2.6.3+ kernel there should be no problems with SATA support and it works quite well, I get about 54mb/sec off of my Western Digital drives. I have one big problem with this board, the SATA raid is ATM, a no go under linux, there are recently released drivers from VIA http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=297#raid but they work only for 2.4.xx and only certain builds at that, which has nearly no support for the SATA controllers on the board yielding 5mb/sec from each drive or 10mb/sec when in a raid 0 configuration. According to this website http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html there should be support in2.4.22+ my guess is that support is considered being able to see, write, and read from the drive which is exactly what I can do at the above 5mb/sec, hardly acceptable for a board with high end features and performance like this, please, someone, prove me wrong so I can have proper RAID.

If the SATA and Southbridge drivers for this board get back-ported to 2.4.xx then it will be formidable indeed, except for the fact that even then the driver is a binary module so you will be unable to boot directly from your RAID array, at the very least though, most of the system can be stored there and only the parts needed to boot will be on a normal PATA drive this should, give us all the benefits of the RAID except in terms of boot time since all critical files for boot will be cached anyway and never read from the hdds again.

You may, be able to use linux software that comes bundled with the Redhat installer to make a virtual software raid which should not be noticeably slower than the original hardware raid. I cannot confirm this though I may experiment with it in the future, other users have reported approximately 100mb/s. I plan on researching how to do this with other distros soon (most notably gentoo), if anyone can tell me that windows will be able to recognize, and interact with the virtual raid that linux makes then please E-mail or PM me, and I will begin researching the easiest way to use the raid with other distros imediately, then add it to this post.

According to this article, http://www.via.com.tw/en/Products/vt6420.jsp the vt6420 raid chipset on these motherboards can handle 4 SATA devices, 2 PATA devices, and with an add-on chip another 4 SATA devices however as far as I can tell the ability to use the add-on chip has been stripped as well as the extra parallel ata cable. I am not familiar enough to know if it supports 4 SATA devices or only two, the motherboard has only two SATA connections but whether these connections act like parralel ATA and can have two devices or only one I have yet to find out.

The board itself works wonderfully, and does exactly what a motherboard should, 8x AGP, Socket A, and the capability to support DDR400 make this motherboard pretty fast, to run at DDR400 speeds though, you can use only two of the three ram dimms, this has been no problem for me since each Dimm can support 1 gig of ram and DDR333 is only marginally slower. Hardware monitors from within the bios are extremely informative, fields displayed include fan speed, cpu temp, mobo temp, and several voltage meters, as well as the ability to control the fan speed ratios directly.

Unfortunately, I have yet to be able to read temperatures, power states or fan speeds from within linux. The only i2c sensors I have found report to me only that I have two sticks of 256mb Geil ram, thankfully correct yet utterly uninformative. ACPI reports nothing.
*update* I have found an article telling me that the two via i2c drivers conflict which is likely the source of my sensors trouble i2c-viapro is the correct one for this board I have yet to try it out though

I wouldn't personally call this an overclockers board, but that is only because it is so apt to take its place in any and all situations, from desktop to server to workstation to gaming machine this board seems designed to handle it all at a decent price. Every option is configurable though, bus multipliers, voltages, cpu and bus frequencies, ram latency, agp voltage, and a host of other goodies will keep enthusiasts at play for hours. The only thing it seems to be missing is the sort of second bios found in boards specifically aimed at those whose only goal is to push their hardware to the utter limits. I can't testify to how well the board actually overclocks because I am yet unwilling to risk my new hardware without any sort of temperature monitor but I am running my XP 2800+ at ~3000+ speeds without difficulty and my low temperature readings whenever I reboot let me think that I have quite a bit of headroom.

Hopefully, drivers will mature or VIA will and we will end up with working sound and raid shortly, I've heard rumors, that suse has some sort of support for the raid on these boards but I have yet to find someone who has succesfully managed to install, boot from, use, and recieve good performance from this raid under any conditions.

Despite all my difficulties, this is a good solid and sound board, at a good price, I can hardly complain when spending less than $80 on a motherboard.

Just a few additions to the above comments.

SATA support: Early on, recompiling the 2.4 kernel in Fedora Core 1 using reasonable selections for the Athlon processor and board components gave SATA access. From my 2.6 kernel test experience, SATA is also supported under the 2.6 kernel, but the current Fedora test packages with 2.6 are too buggy to use right now. However, I have the SATA drives configured as Raid 0 for WinXP and linux does not recognize them as a single drive (software Raid, as I understand it), but displays the two individual drives. I plan to drop the Raid and move linux from the PATA to SATA drives.

Integrated LAN (3com 3C940/3C2000): The ASUS supplied drivers would not install. Not much good has been said in this forum about the 3com drivers for this chip, anyway. The SysKonnect drivers installed without a hitch by just following the instructions for the InstallPackage for kernel 2.4.13 and above (http://www.syskonnect.com/syskonnect/support/driver/d0102_driver.html). Follow this link to the SK-98xx adapter and you will find the linux drivers about three pages in. The adapter was also in the Fedora list of adapters, but I could never get the SysKonnect 98 (3C940) to install by selecting that option and had to do the manual install, which was fairly easy to do and fast by linux standards.

Sound: No sound so far. I tried to install the current ALSA drivers for the Analog Devices, Inc. AD1980, but could not get it to go. ALSA documentation indicates that these and many other drivers are incorporated in the 2.6 kernel, so I am going to wait for 2.6 and stop fooling with this nonsense.

Overview: I bought this VIA-based board for a low-end server and it has functioned very well in that capacity for the past 2 months. With the availability of the 2.6 kernel, configuration of the onboard components should be a snap, so don’t be put off by comments about configuration difficulties. In my view, either ASUS /VIA Technologies did not provide appropriate linux drivers for the onboard components or this board was simply ahead of its time. Both are probably true. For you dual booters, the board runs Win98se and WinXP very nicely.

The board came with excellent installation instructions, has a nice layout for connectors and was easy to install and wire. None of this hiding connectors between PCI slots garbage.

The BIOS have very good control features and a wide range of speed selections for overclocking the memory and cpu, in addition to an ASUS supplied windows-based application that lets you change both in real time. Unfortunately, my Athlon XP 3200 will only safely overclock about 5% (11.5x @ 200MHz external). For 1GB of Micron DDR 400 memory, overclocking the memory to 418 MHz (cpu external 209 MHz, DDR memory = 2 x external) and keeping the CPU multiplier at 11.0x seems to be a good compromise, based on a WinXP-based performance evaluation utility. At 12.0x @ 200 MHz external, the cpu eventually locks up in WinXP and at 12.5x, the system will not post. CPU overheating was not a problem. At idle without overclocking, the temperature sits at 47C and fully overclocked at full load it gets up to 53C in an Antec SLK3700-BQE case.

This is a good board for a very reasonable price.

Only had one problem with a USB hub. (hotplug issue)
I am posting a solution on this forum soon.

The Suse 9.1 had no problem installing onto 62g partitions
of my 200g Seagate drive , nor any problem finding or using
any of my SCSI-3 hard drives.
including an old JAZ drive (scsi1).
Asus is one of the best MOBO's made and we have 50 of them running for over 5 years 24/7 here at the Airport.
NG:
It is rumored that SATA is not working. on some Distro's
Be sure to load A current Nvidia video driver ( Nvidia is the best IMHO)

The price mentioned above is for the MOBO , K7 3000 AMD CPU
and PC3200 memory at 512m. (turn key bare bones)

If you like the K7 AMD chip and Linux , this is not a bad choice.
Go for it.
PS it will install of XP not hurting XP and setting up a dual boot.
BUY Suse ! Support Linux , Starve the Criminal Bill Gates. IMHO

PS2: all features on this MOBO worked perfect out of the gate with SUSE9.1. sound, ports,pci, 1gig lan chip 3com , every part works. the USB hub problem is strickly Suse 9.1 install issue not
any fault with this MOBO and linux in general.
The hub works only if I have 2 USB mice installed.
Wierd .

To this point yes&no, 1st problem missing connector from reset switch to mobo i/o input strip on mobo . unable to complete install os. No everything else installed with out problems, even fired up till the glitch snagged connector & stopped install. working on that glitch. sreached net for connector no success. will have to skelotonize fan for connector. aah well surgery scheduled asap! will update & inform users of progress
with success. ASAP!
Have a 300W ps, (2)two hdd; Maxtor 40g & WD 6.4g (storage)(backup), ATI radeon 7000 32mb videocard,
AMD processor 7.1mgh. planning to install dvd r+-/rw+-.
dialup modem,(have afew). ASAP will update users of progress.

Most things are working, but as mentioned above, I also have trouble with the audio device.
I have tried to find a driver at ASUS hompeage with no luck. I have not tried the onboard LAN but that had some LINUX drivers availeble to download. My configuration tool finds the VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller] hardware but the two suggested drivers VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller] and VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller] fails.
My 160GB S-ATA disk from seagate works fine.

So my recomendation is to buy another bord with better support for Linux drivers.

My motherboard seems to work fine with Fedora.

I had a few random lockups at first, but that was while I was still sorting out some of the config, so probably my fault.

The on-board LAN and on-board Sound work fine - auto-detected and no problems.

I have not tried the SATA drives - I only have IDE. I had thought of getting one of these, but having read of the problems people are having getting them to work, I might give that a miss.

The only problem I have is with USB pendrives. These auto-mount and seem to display the file contents correctly, but trying to read from them usually causes a lockup of the whole system - which needs a reset. Also, the drives mount as vfat (which is correct), but display as unknown. This might be the end of partition problem, I have seen mentioned elsewhere. Also, I use the readahead option on startup, which I think might also be involved with this. Of course, it might be a problem with the pendrives, not the Motherboard.

SATA works great, but be sure you build the VIA SATA driver into the kernel. LAN doesn't work, neither does sound, but I don't have any gigabit devices, and have a high-end SB XGamer 5.1 card anyway, so it doesn't matter. I have installed dozens of distros and had great luck on all of them, but only with 2.6 kernels. I think the only 2.4 kernel distro I have gotten to install is Slack, but what is the point of using a 2.4 kernel when 2.6 is far better.

I am running an AMD 2800+ with three 512 modules - two of which are Kingston DDR400, and one Crucial DDR333. The speed diff between the DDR400 and 333 is not noticeable at all - maybe with some sort of benchmarking software, but who cares about a couple of milliseconds.