I have an older 40 gig IDE drive thats a prime candidate to house a linux distro (dual-boot) for playing around with. I've tried Gentoo in the past, but it takes too long to do anything due to compiling from source. I'm looking for a (free) distro with modern hardware support built in. I don't want to spend a month getting general functionality before I can play around with it (my standard Linux experience in the past).

-=Core System=-
Mobo Soyo KT600 Dragon Plus
Processor: AMD Athlon 3200+
Video: nVidia GeForce 6800GT
RAM: 2x512 PC3200
Ethernet: Microsoft Wireless MN-730
Audio: Creative Audigy 2 ZS

-=Drives=-
2x Seagate 80GB SATA RAID-0
1x Seagate 40GB UATA66 IDE
1x Generic 16X DvD Drive
1x Lite-On LTR-52327S CDRW
1x Sony 1.44 Floppy

-=Peripherals=-
MS Intellimouse Explorer
MS Enhanced Internet Keyboard
Sony 5.1 Surround

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. I'm downloading Slackware 10 right now, but am going in blind on what to expect compatiability wise. If I have problems with more than 1 device I'll just 86 the distro and try the next. While its not essential for the distro to be able to read the NTFS partition on the SATA RAID, its a nice to have. I'm a .NET programmer by trade and want to try out Mono.

ive got Slackware 10 and it certainly runs America's Army far faster than my old Suse distro did. ur better off making sure Fluxbox or a similar basic X-based GUI is installed so u can use KDE/Gnome for ur normal desktop use and Flubox/Blackbox or similar for games, ull be amazed at what a difference a simple GUI can make. Native linux games tend to be very good (America's Army, Enemy Territory, Doom 3 and so forth) but for a wider range u will have to use Cedega (WineX's new monicker) to play Windows games, they will almost certainly still play at a high fps.

for games in general tho i would recommend a more advanced distro such as Slackware or Debian, just so it can be optimised for speed and low memory/CPU usage. just look at how slow Windows XP games can run!