Hi all,
I am buying components to build my own computer, which I hope to overclock as much as possible.
So far I have bought the motherboard and the CPU:
- DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR VENUS
- Opteron 170 (Dual-core, Socket 939)

I will be using SATA drives with this system and an NVIDIA
GEForce 7800-based video card (because of NVIDIA support for LINUX). In fact I want to avoid anything that is NOT supported by LINUX as I will be using LINUX as the prime Operating System on this computer.

I will be chasing up all the features available on this board for compatibility with LINUX, such as:
- AMD Cool & Quiet (is the O/S involved here at all?)
- nForce4 SLI chipset support (I will not use SLI)
- Silicon Image Sil3114 chip support
- Vitesse VSC8201 and Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet
- USB 2.0 support
- IEEE1394 support
- PCI Express support (up to 16x)
- Realtek ALC850 and AC'97 Sound support
- SATA 3Gbps support

Before I launch into my research:
- Has anyone here done something similar and are there any general LINUX 'gotcha's?
- If so, what LINUX distro would provide the best support for all the above features?

Thanks you in advance for any help.

PS This system will not use ECC RAM.

I recently bought a custom-built box based on an ASUS k8n-dl motherboard, dual AMD opteron cpus, 2 gig ram, Broadcom ASUSTeK NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express card, on-board nVidia graphics. The rest of the features are basically the same as those you propose to use.

The only thing I had to do other than turn on power was to download and install nVidias updated graphics driver. The one supplied by SuSE worked, but without 3d. The updated driver fixed that problem.

Cool!
I didn't expect too many problems, but It's always nice to hear about other people's experiences.

Thanks for your info.

This sounds like one of Monarch's configurations up until a couple of months ago. Has that been working well for you? I've been looking at Monarch for a pre-built system but they've changed their m'board selections and I'm not sure how well the new ones are supported. (What I've found via Google seems to indicate mixed results for a lot of people.) SuSE, which is my much-preferred distribution, is (sadly) not available as a pre-load by Monarch any more. :-(

I'm now seriously looking at stick-building the whole box now but I'm looking for other user's experiences with Opteron-based systems before I jump into that. So... any tips and/or gotchas, alternate vendors, etc. that you can pass along would be greatly appreciated.

TIA...

--
RT

I'm based in Australia so I can't comment on overseas (US) distributors, although I bought the Opteron 170 on US eBay (I got it delivered here for less than I could buy it for in the local shops!).
IF you're worried about Linux on an Opteron don't be.
I got two versions working first up:
- Slackware 10.2 and
- SLAMD 10.2 (but I haven't finished installing this one)
I'm currently into overclocking this and all the utilities seem to work without any problems.
If you have any specific questios let fly and I'll try to answer.