Mike, I'm not sure yet, it hasn't arrived yet but I hope tomorrow, or *sometime* this week all the pieces will arrive.

Y'know, until I began shopping for a board, I had no idea there were THAT many companies producing them, and I had certainly never heard of Biostar, Foxconn, Shuttle, and numerous others. I was pretty familiar with 'the big three' type of companies, like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, Intel, and so on.
And I will keep in mind the info you give about the Biostar boards maybe for future reference-- once I found them and read a little bit, and checked out their website, I thought "Oh yeah -- Junk" LOL but then after some semi-positive reviews from some of the major hardware reviewers like tomshardware and hardOCP, they were actually pretty decent in many regards, though being somewhat new, there were numerous 'bugs' and 'glitches' when tested and compared to the major brands' boards, particularly with their BIOS's. The type of bugs which will mostly be fixed with improved BIOS code, which the major brands had already learned to avoid.

I *HAD* decided near the end of my search to order an Asus P5N-SLI because it was on sale for 7 days at $99.00 CAD (regular $189.00 on the same site) and I instantly thought "holy cow, that's to ogood a deal to pass up" and at the last minute, figured I would triple-check the CPU support list, and sure enough, the stupid things WILL NOT run a 9xx Pentium OR a Core-2 E2160, among others, and I had had my heart set on the E2160 for some time. I *almost* ordered the board and a Pentium 631, but the decision was eating at me, and I changed my mind and kept looking.
I am now VERY comfortable with my MSI purchase. Will let the forum know through my posts down the road how the board works out, and I really really hope it doesn't arrive DOA, as you're right, I cannot BELIEVE the number of reports on the net, about EVERY brand of board, arriving DOA more often than one would have thought. Incredible, really.

might i suggest going to ebay or craigslist and buying a motherboard made by intel itself, i have had GREAT success with theit P-4 Boards, while running PC 1066 Rambus, so look for upgraided versions of the intel D850, D865, and the D875 chipsets, cuz theose ones only support the pentium 4 CPU's, the 462 pin ones ( i think its 462 pins anyway)

I've become a bit of an Epox loyalist...

I had an Epox nForce2 board running an Athlon 2100+ at a true 2.1GHz for a year and a half before it suffered the bad capacitor curse that plagued so many boards at the time.

Now I have an Epox nForce3 board running an Athlon64 3000+ (not overclocked) and it has been dead stable for quite some time (since the 3000+ Venice core was a brand new chip).

On the other hand I have an old ASUS board running a PIII 450MHz from the days when the 450 was second only to the 500. But it seems that since then the ASUS boards I've dealt with have been 50/50 on reliability. I repair a lot of systems at work and it seems that about 40% of my repairs are ASUS motherboard replacements. Notably all nForce chipsets.

YOU FORGOT MSI

oh and i will never use another biostar mobo in my LIFE! ive had nothing but trouble with them. eVGA makes an awsome board and FOXCONN makes some nice stuff. never had a DOA on anything but a biostar though...

Whew!
Hi everyone! I'm *almost* back..
Been occupying myself with a new pet snake while waiting for my new board, which FINALLY has arrived, for the second time.
Advice: If you can avoid using UPS (the parcel people) then do so.
Long story short: They delivered my board while I was away in Manitoba, obviously neglecting to get my signature as nobody was home, despite my contacting them 5 times asking them to locate the package and hold it for pickup. They left it outside on the patio. It rained that night. I got the shipper to send another courier (a UPS agent) to retreive it the next day and hold it for pickup. I returned to Nova Scotia a week later; the phone message told me where to go pick it up. I went there (an hour drive), they had no idea where it was. Said they'd call me when they found it. I went home. Another phone call tells me to come pick it up 'here' instead of 'there', so I go 'here' and wait for man to find it again. He returns with a squashed flat, rain-soaked, nearly destroyed box, containing my board. I refuse the shipment and they sand it back, first losing it again in the process. Shipper finally gets it back a week later, waits for a new one to come from their supplier, waits more at my request while they change their shipping company from UPS to FedEx, and then they ship my NEW new board to me again, which I received yesterday!
Yay!! And so far I love it! Trusty Slackware 11 even booted up the first time, despite being totally (explicitly) configured for another CPU, chipset, video card, etc.. Cool!
Anyhow, I'm getting re-aquainted with Linux and aquainted with the new machine; lot's of configgering and tweaking to do, new drivers to install, monitors to set up, etc, so I have my work cut out, but once I get things under control, I'll hopefully be gradually getting back into my Slackware rebuild.

So, I declare this post closed and thank everyone for their input and interest.
See you back in the 'Re-compiling Slackware' soon.

SVA