am planning on building my first computer and i want to buy a great mother board for gaming. i was leaning towards a n2force. but i thought there might be some suggestions here.

Mine seems to work OK. It's below in the sig.

Later



Oh, forgot to say this. Make sure your distro supports SATA BEFORE you buy. Some do not yet.

Bro - check out http://www.newegg.com They are a top notch vendor, and I built my entire rig from stuff I bought from them. The prices and delivery speed are top notch. What I especially like is that they permit customers to post comments about each item they sell, so if you're looking at a particular model of [whatever HW], you can check out what other people's experiences have been. Personally I think that feature is really helpful. -- J.W.

thanks guys i made up my mind about the mother board. i went to newegg and boy am exited about my new motherboard thanks.

What did you get?

Later

I'll second dalek's question - whudja buy? Inquiring minds want to know! -- J.W.

am planning on ordering it this friday. unless someone else has a better suggestion for a mother board

1)Asus Motherboard for AMD Athlon XP/Duron Processors, Model# A7N8X Deluxe Retail
Socket A AMD Athlon XP/Duron (support AMD XP 3200+ "Barton")
Chipset: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra SPP, nForce2 MCP-T
FSB: 400/333/266MHz
IDE: 2 x ATA133
RAM: Dual Channel DDR 400 3x 184-pin DIMM Sockets (PC3200/PC2700/PC2100 non-ECC DDR)
Slots: 1x AGP (Pro/8X), 5x PCI
Ports: 6x USB2.0
Onboard Silicon Image Sil 3112A Controller w/ 2 ports
NVIDIA SoundStorm Audio Processor Unit with Dolby
MCP integrated 3Com MAC + Broadcom AC101L PHY LAN
Firewire 1394: 2 Ports MCP-T integrated IEEE 1394a + Realtek PHY 8801B

or

2)Asus Motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 Processors, Model# K8V Deluxe - RETAIL
Specifications:
Supported CPU: AMD Socket 754 Athlon 64 Processor
Chipset: VIA K8T800 + VIA VT8237
FSB: Hyper Transport
RAM: 3x DDR400/333/266 ECC Support Max 3GB
IDE: 2x Ultra DMA ATA133/100/66 up to 4 Devices
SATA: 4x SATA 150
RAID: RAID 0,1 (2x SATA Ports); RAID 0,1, 0+1 (2x SATA Ports)
Slots:1x AGP (8X) 5x PCI
Ports: 2xPS2, 1xCOM, 1xLPT, 2x1394, 1xLAN, 8xUSB20, and Audio
Onboard Audio: ADI 1980 6 Channel Codec
Onboard LAN: 3COM 3C940 Gigabit

I have an ASUS P4P800 (it's for the P4 chip, in case you couldn't gather that from the name) and it ROCKS. The motherboard is good, and I LOVE the ASUS probe utility...

shoe

Make sure that your Distro supports SATA and that raid. Go to www.google.com/linux and search for your mobo model and the distro like "Mandrake 9.2" or "Redhat 9" with the quotes. See if anyone else is having problems. To many forums to search through them all but that will give you a idea of what to expect.

ASUS, ABIT and such are good mobos. They have been around a while. Make sure that anything on board, sound, video, nic, USB etc have a way to disable just in case you run into trouble. Sometimes BIOS, sometimes a jumper.

Ttrying to save you a headache latter on. Better to ward off a problem than to experience it.

Later