I just bought and installed this board.
Installation was easy (though tight for my Antec 1650 case).
It's a quiet board, the only active fan on it is on the CPU (A64 3000+).
RedStorm2 does NOT work on this platform "yet". I emailed Soltek and got a prompt reply that their software engineer is working on it. Only thing that worries me is the singular noun (one software engineer!?).
I too was tossing between Chaintech's board and this one, and chose this after reading about the prodigious heat output of the Nforce chipset. While overall speed may be reduced by implementing a N/S chipset approach, integrating everything on one chip seems to create heat issues. I'll gladly sacrifice a wee bit o' speed for longevity; hopefully I've done just that. Considering that I'm upgrading from a FIC 503+ Socket 7 board, longevity is something I need!
There are a few peculiarities that I'm experiencing; though with this being such a huge upgrade (All new system, all new OS, etc.), I'm not certain where the peculiarities arise.
My new system for instance, won't/can't find my external modem if I forget to turn it on before I boot up. On my old system, running Win98SE, if I forget to turn the modem on it's no problem to do so after the fact. In this one (running WinXP), the same modem must be on before boot or I have to turn the modem on and reboot to access it.
Also, while the board package is very well supplied, there is a parallel port option that is not supplied. I would have liked that for my printer.
The only other beef is the one supplied serial COM port (for that modem) is a 15-pin male jack; my modem is a 25-pin male jack. Using an adapter close to the system port makes it impossible to access the keyboard PS2 port (the serial port is aligned vertically, so even the 15-pin's end piece gets close to the PS2 port; with a 25-pin adaptor, there's no way). Aligning this port horizontally would have avoided this problem.
Also, by default, the BIOS is set as 'non-PNP OS'...might this be a problem?
And lastly, any suggestions on overclocking? I would like to bump my 90nm 3000 up to a true 2GHz (mostly for the thrill of quadrupling my last CPU's speed

); and while I've an idea of what's best, I'd love input as to your results.
I'm running Corsair ValueSelect PC3200 btw, so I can't push the mem hard, I'm sure.
TIA