Well, other than reversing the LAN and WAN ports of my firewall card, the transition went smoothly. The new system is up and going and waiting for a kernel recompile and reboot (sometime in the morning when I wake up I guess). The board I got was the Asus A7V600-X, SATA, 8 USB2 ports (in theory), etc etc. Nothing hugely strange. I was a bit dissapointed at the contents of the box, or lack thereof anyway. I don’t use the USB (it’s a server after all), but while it does have 4 ports on the board itself, there were not cables or backplane card provided for the other 4 like the other board I got. No SATA cables either, and while I did get two IDE cables, only one was the fast kind. (Update: almost forgot to mention that the board has only two fan sensor attachments, one right next to the CPU and one near the front fan, which would be fine if I had a front fan with a sensor, not a back fan with a sensor). Not a huge deal, I have spares, but still. Maybe that’s what the “-X” is for.
Thanks again to cdnGEEK for his suggestion of VIA vs nforce2 as far as the chipset goes. Although I can’t say I can tell the difference other than the box is much faster (coming from a celeron 533 to a xp2500+ will do that I guess 🙂
I also got my video card back, though I do think it requires a couple…. erhm… few…. hundreds of hours of play testing using the latest and most graphically intense testing programs I can push at it. So far this has been a good start though.