i'm about to build a new workstation and am looking for a motherboard that will work well with shrike. i have a couple of boxes up and running now. one is an msi k7-n2 the other is an asus a7a-266.

the k7n has a couple of driver problems. primarily with the nic and audio. further, it has problems with the sata controller... siig. it will not allow dma.

the asus seems to have no porblems. it works just fine.

can anyone tell me the best boards to use with the os that i want.
i want serial ata. this is the most important thing. even if it isn't onboard, i want serial ata.

thanks in advance

chris

I myself use the MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR and have had the said problem with the network card but the sound actually worked for me at one point when I didn't disable it before installing Mandrake a few months ago when I was still using it.

The SATA uses the Promise chipset which is directly supported by the Linux Kernel, so there really shouldn't be much of a problem with the board.