I would suggest getting one of the new Socket 939 motherboards for upgradability reasons since they are replacing Socket 754. Currently it appears only the 3500+ and 3800+ use 939 so it may be out of your price range, the 3500+ is ~ $500 and 3800+ ~ $700. A low end 2800+ (S754) is only around $180 so it depends on your budget. :) The only major motherboard component that I know of that is currently unsupported is the Promise sata plus controller's pata port. There are also a few minor problems with some of the AMD64 laptops, but most of their issues have been resolved in the 2.6.7 kernel. If you want a quiet system I would recommend getting a motherboard without a fan on it. Also get either a Radeon 9200, 9550, 9600 since the normal models only use heatsinks. Note however that ATI has not released their 64bit linux drivers yet, but all the above cards should work fine with XFree86 4.3 in 2D mode. The 9200 should even do 3D mode, but I don't play games on my desktop system so I have not tested it. A nice case that is quiet is the Antec Sonata, when paired up with a front panaflo 120mm L1A fan. If you do happen to get that fan get the normal 4 pin power connector for it so it can be hooked up to the Antec fan power connectors. If you want a fast hard drive go for the WDC Raptor 74GB SATA which is 10Krpm and costs ~ $200. I would stay away from nvidia based motherboards, but that is just due to their general lack of open source support. I stopped buying anything from them about 4 years ago. My system will likely be similar to this soon: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (S754) MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R Kingston HyperX PC3500 512MB (2) WDC Raptor 74GB SATA WDC Caviar SE 250GB SATA Pioneer A04 DVD-RW Panasonic LS-120 ATI Radeon 9600 256MB AverMedia M150 TV Card Antec Sonata Logitech Cordless MX Duo The only part I haven't looked into yet is whether the AverMedia tv capture card works under linux since it uses a new chipset. Chris
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