Asus P4P800-VM motherboard with 2.4 GHz Intel P4 to them and upgrade my own machine. Since I do a fair amount of number crunching but am not too concerned about video performance on my workstation, I started looking for a new motherboard with a cheap but decent nVidia video chipset and decent audio chipset onboard, with good Linux compatibility reports. I was also interested in an AMD 64 bit architecture since I had heard so many glowing performance reports. It seemed like the amd64 architecture had been around long enough to have most of the painful issues worked out in Linux, and I like to play around with new-but-not-bleeding-edge technology. So I narrowed my choice to amd64 motherboards and looked for some Linux motherboard recommendations online. Newegg.com turned up a few likely contenders.
After seeing a few negative comments at various places around the web regarding Asus' negative attitude toward Linux users, and not liking some of Asus' recent hot and fan-ful motherboards, I decided to give other vendors a try. The MSI K8NGM2-FID had a couple of positive Linux user reports on Newegg, and was certainly cheap enough, with onboard nVidia 6150 video, so I got one.
