The motherboard in my PC is failing. I was going to replace the whole thing later this year anyway, so I'm just going to do it now.

This is the machine I decided to get. Anyone see any component here that won't work with SuSe 10.0? It's a deal breaker, since I don't use Windows except for games.

CPU: (Socket AM2) AMD Athlon™64 X2 4600+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
MOTHERBOARD: (Socket AM2)GigaByte GA-M55SLI-S4 nForce4 SLI Chipset DDR2/800 SATA 16x PCI-Express MBoard w/GbLAN, IEEE1394, USB2.0, &7.1Audio
MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard)2GB (2x1GB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory (Corsair Value Select or Major Brand)
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GT 512MB 16X PCI EXPRESS VIDEO CARD
HARD DRIVE: SPECIAL!!! 160GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8M Cache 7200RPM Hard Drive
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO

Many people are very aware of this: on-board sound is crappy most of the times -rare exceptions- and most times you have to compile your ati or nvidia drivers from their propietary sources for having best performance. Be advised. Not much work or money on any of that, anyway.

A recent LXer link to Linux Journal's Ultimate Linux system included the following motherboard recomendations. Yours may well be equally satisfactory, but just for thought...

To make installing Linux easier, I recommend sticking with PATA. Use SATA for extra storage instead for an OS drive.

I have Western Digital WD1600SB PATA hard drive. It is the RE series, so it should last a long time. It is also near quiet during reading and writing. Open Office takes about 5 seconds to load up. It took two to three times longer with my previous hard drive.

I strongly recommend buying ECC memory. A lot people do not know that multi-processor systems needs ECC memory at the very least. If you use non-ECC memory, your computer will have twice the amount of problems than a single processor system. Two 1 GB Kingston DDR2-800 ECC memory costs about $330 at newegg.com. This may seem a lot but in the future your computer will be reliable. My computer (Pentium 4 2GHz) is using ECC memory and I have experience very little to no crashes.

Thanks for the replies.

I didn't understand something in that linuxjournal article....
"taint" the kernel?

What's the concern with SATA drives? That's the only kind of drive offered at the place I'm buying, but I can just configure it without any hard drive if there's going to be a problem.

From what I've read about proprietary drivers (drivers downloaded from Nvidia's or ATI's website) is that the Nvidia/ATI installer thinks that only the nvidia driver will be using the glx libs and so just replaces them without regard for other applications. It is other applications which fail, lock up the computer, crash etc.

I run Fedora which has very good SATA support, I have read about other distributions having issues when you install the OS on SATA drives with RAID enabled, some just plain don't work, SATA is still very new and we all know Linux takes a back seat to Windows in the manufacturer's mind when it comes to drivers and support. I remember with FC3 I couldn't even get the installer to detect the SATA drives, I did get it to install on the SATA drives w/RAID but only after a lot of reading and trial and error, I no longer run Linux on that sytem so I'm not sure if I would have the same problems with FC5. I would do some research about SuSe and SATA2 drives, some chipsets may work better than others, I have no idea if SATA2 would be different than SATA because they are newer technology

My Fedora desktop has one SATA and one PATA drive, I installed it on the PATA because the SATA is used for Windows, the setup did see the SATA drive right off the bat so I assume I wouldn't have any issues if I would have installed it on the SATA drive.

With the new SATA2 drives out you will notice a moderate performance increase if you do get everything working properly so it might be worth the hassle.

Since you are already spending a good chunk of change for this system I would get 2 small 10,000 rpm SATA2 hd's for the OS and then get a large PATA drive for storage, that way you don't have to fill up your OS drive which will keep things running faster.

If you use SUSE, you are going to have problems using two cards or SLI because of sax. I suggest using another distribution that is not proprietary. Gentoo is an execellent distribution that gives the user a lot of freedom.

Tainting means contamination. The kernel thinks that there might be bugs, backdoors, spyware, and viruses in the module. Also the assembler files are not compiled with the kernel. The track record of nVidia based on reliability and stability is very good, so you should not worry. I worry about ATI if I were you. Some people see the word tainting and they stop using the software. The problem with both ATI and nVidia modules (drivers) is they overwrite Xorg or XFree86 files with out archiving them or moving them to somewhere else. Gentoo gives you an option of using X11 libraries or using the proprietary libraries from the manufacture by using symbolic links when selecting either X11 or proprietary OpenGL libraries.

That is weird that your store only has SATA. I think the sales person is pulling your chain. Many SATA controllers have stability and relibility problems. These problems are DMA can be enabled, data corruption, and occausionally read/write error messages. The SATA controllers that I suggest using are 3ware 8000 series, 3ware 9000 series, Highpoint RocketRAID 1520, Highpoint RocketRAID 1540, or Highpoint RocketRAID 1640. You can go ahead and buy SATA hard drives, but do not say I did not warn you.

Western Digital Raptor 74 GB hard drives are the fastest SATA hard drive. People think 150 GB versions are better but they are not. I suggest buying two and put them in RAID-1 (mirroring) to cut down accesing times in half. I suggest using the mention SATA controllers, so you do not have any problems.