Christmas is almost here, and I will be getting an AMD-64 motherboard upgrade.

Can anyone suggest a (some) good vendor(s)?

ABIT
ASUS
Gigabyte

Do not get anything less than VIA K8T800 Pro if you like VIA. nVidia nForce3 chipsets are also good but you may have problems setting up the NIC and controlling its firewall. Try to get 939 socket because the 754 socket is going to be AMD economy socket. Do not expect the sound, NIC, SATA, and Firewire to work in Linux, so use PCI devices instead.

People are going to disagree that ASUS is Linux compatible but every motherboard manufacture like ABIT, Gigabyte, DFI, MSI, FIC, SOYO are in the same boat as ASUS. This because all the junk on the motherboard like the NIC, sound, SATA, and Firewire may not be compatible. People can e-mail or call these motherboard manufactures to whine at them, but they will say the same thing we do not support Linux. Yes, it would be nice that some on-board junk work in Linux, but it is tightly controlled by the manufacture that made the NIC, sound, SATA, and Firewire chips. The motherboard companies do not have any control of those chip manufactures.

If you want to use SATA, use Highpoint controllers because they support Linux very well unlike other controller manufactures.

geez... i didn't know that there were so many incompatibilities with linux and AMD64 mobos!

Here are my specs (Running Redhat9):
AMD Athlon 64 2800+
Asus K8V SE Deluxe (VIA)
1GB DDR400
2x200GB Seagate PATA HDD
Asus ATI Radeon 9200SE
Gigabyte CD-RW
Asus DVD+/-RW

I have my NIC and sound running kind of OK after a kernel upgrade... recently alsasound is giving errors during boot, trying to solve that...

Lucky that I didn't get SATA drives so soon!
Can't get the 3D acceleration to work yet...
Having problems burning DVDs...
Haven't got the gear to try Firewire...

Hope to hear some comments

I'm waiting on my new motherboard to arrive:

ASUS K8V-X
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
1 GB DDR 400

I have a Asus K7V mothboard running a Athlon 800 right now - seems to handle Fedora and other flavors of Linux better than Windows XP...