Gone are my days of overclocking and bleeding performance. I am converting my ex-gaming rig to a dedicated Linux workstation, and I believe my motherboard is failing.

I believe this because extensive tests on RAM and HDDs pass repeatedly yet I still have intermittent, unpredictable errors with regard to hard disk I/O. They manifest randomly when I'm working on any number of apps/tasks, where Gnome freezes, won't respond to commands, I hard-reboot and find my OS root partition (/dev/md0) is no longer intact.

At first, I blamed it on Ubuntu and enjoyed a long stretch of comfortable computing on Debian before the same problem happened again. This time I was compiling ffmpeg and all of the sudden it found that /tmp is now a "read-only filesystem." Gnome locked and I hard-rebooted to find that /dev/md0 is now an ext2 filesystem with no data on it (ext3 journal deleted ??). Gahhhh. So after the painful task of reinstalling for the n-th time, I've concluded it's time to graduate my P5W DH Deluxe into something more geared for work. I can't think of any other explanation since both HDDs pass Western Digital tests and my RAM passed 12 hours of memtest.

I googled for "linux motherboard" and found plenty of out-of-date hits. I understand Linux runs well on nearly any hardware, but I'm asking for a handful of opinions on motherboards (or just brands) that you've known to run exceptionally well. I am NOT looking for overclocking, high-end video, 15 PCIE slots, or the like. I also understand this is a largely subjective question and I don't want to start a holy war.

I do, however, want to support my Q9550 along with 4GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. I run an md raid-1 array, so I'd like at least 4 SATA ports. 1 PCIEx16 port for video. 1 PCI slot for legacy support. Beyond that, I don't care. I want a board I can count on and forget about. Price isn't a huge concern. I would rather pay more now and not have this problem again. I have been an Asus fanboy but my convictions are up for grabs at this point. I greatly appreciate ANY suggestions with regard to a new motherboard or possibly why I keep having hard lock hell.

Thanks in advance! Cheers.

-austin

The Q9550 is an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor.

When I was researching motherboards two years ago I got the impression that Tyan are the best quality so you could consider their socket 775 models. I didn't get one because they do not make a model to support the low electrical power AMD processors I wanted to use, instead choosing a high range Gigabyte. ASUS boards are very popular locally; the low range boards do not seem very reliable but their high range models seem OK.

That is exactly my experience with ASUS. I have not looked in to Tyan, but they do look very promising for what I want. Thank you very much for your suggestion!