Asus A8V Motherboard
If you are thinking of setting up a single CPU AMD socket 939 Linux system your best choice by far is the
Asus A8V motherboard.
This motherboard not only supports the powerful AMD64 CPUs, yet also the dual-core variants.
In addition it offers one thing you won't find on any other low-cost AMD motherboard: ECC DDR RAM support. Not only does it support ECC, yet to make things even better it works with unbuffered ECC DDR memory, which is roughly the same cost as conventional DDR RAM (buffered, also called registered, is nearly twice the price).
There is a
perl script that can dump the northbridge registers to check whether ECC is enabled on the A8V (it can also turn ECC on, yet I recommend doing that through the BIOS).
I recommend turning on all the ECC features if you bought ECC memory (it is more expensive, yet worth it for a server). Make sure your kernel supports the MCE (Machine Check Exception) feature of the CPU so that any ECC correctable errors show up in your syslog/dmesg and any uncorrectable errors will halt the system.
All of the devices on the A8V are well supported in the 2.6 Linux kernel, including the on-board PATA, SATA and gigabit ethernet controllers.
Here are some links related to the A8V:
