Why not just go for the Asus A7V8X (KT400 chipset) motherboard? One less lan connection and no firewire, but the price is $31.00 less. The performance of the nForce2 doesn't seem significantly better than the KT400 boards. Plus, the nForce2 boards are supposed to have some current issues with running Linux. It seems that waiting a while longer on the nForce2 boards to mature a little bit might be the best option.