I have an nforce2 based board as well (A7N8X Deluxe) and love it. Mine also has dual NIC's onboard and one works just great with the 3c59x module. I can't say much about the nvidia network card, since I haven't really used it. Sound has also worked perfectly for me. I recently installed Gentoo on it from the new 2004.1 release and it's worked great except for one thing. I have the hardware set up to do RAID0 on the two SATA connections and support for the raid controller was just added to the 2.4.26 kernel so to install if you decide to go that route you'll need to create a custom boot disk or backport / compile the module for a kernel on the install disc from your distribution of choice. (With this module the second option is actually easier than you think). I'll join the crowd and recommend it as well.So two of your recommend motherboards with the nforce chipset, but one says there are only experimental hacked drivers for Linux for this chipset (i.e. on board stuff). What's the story? I'm currently leaning away from anything nvidia, except for maybe a graphics card (I just want to be able to play bzflag or armegatron occasionally with decent performance).
Bryan
For graphics cards, I'd recommend an ATI. Nvidia cards are probably better supported in Linux, but I have been impressed with ATI's new drivers. I've got OpenGL and DRI working great. From what I've seen the ATI cards perform comparable if not better than their Nvidia counterparts in most cases. I don't want to start any religious wars over who has better video cards so i'll stop now. :)
Well if you do decide to go with an nforce2 board, you've now got at least three people that can help out if you have any problems.
Dave Madsen
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