I've been working on a new system for myself in the few free hours I have after work. So far so good, though I'm far from finished reinstalling everything. Here's my $1200 machine:
CPU: Athlon 64 3200+ (Newcastle core - 512 kb L2 cache 2.2 GHz clock)
MB: Asus K8N-E Deluxe (Socket 754, nForce 3 250gB)
Ram: Corsair XMS 3200 (Cas 2) - 512 MB x 2 = 1 GB total
Video card: ATI Radeon 9800 Standard 128 MB (carry over from old system)
LAN: On board (gigabit w/ hardware firewall built into chipset)
Sound: On board (8 channel Realtek ALC850 - it's decent)
Hard Drive(s): 2x Seagate 160 GB 8 MB Serial ATA - Raid 0 64kb stripe size for approx 300 GB total storage using onboard nVidia raid controller (Do you know how long it takes to format 300 GB under Win2k...)
Case: Antec P160
PS: Antec Truepower 480W
DVD-+RW: Liteon 851S
Floppy
Windows 2000 SP4
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My first impressions of the motherboard (as it is brand new - literally only a couple weeks) is that it seems decent. The bios does seem a bit inmature, but there isn't anything really missing. The 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 Firewire ports are nice. There are 6 Serial ATA ports, all capable of RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and JBOD. Performance of the nVidia raid controller is good, I'm getting 82 MB per second from these Seagate drives. If I wanted to live with the noise of a WD Raptor it would be higher. This board also has gigabit ethernet and 8 channel sound w coax and optical outputs onboard.
About the only issues I had was that the system is VERY picky about memory. To get the system stable with 2 512 MB sticks of memory I had to run timings of 2,3,3,8 2T, which gives a memory bandwidth of about 2900 MB/s. With one stick I can run 2,3,2,6 1T, which gave a score of about 3050 MB/s.
(Remember that socket 754 Athlon 64s are single channel memory. If I had time to wait for a socket 939 dual channel board then I would have been able to run the faster timings, as there would have only been 1 memory stick per channel. Unfortunately I had to build this system by the end of this month.)
I really like the Antec P160 case. It's light (aluminum) and easy to work with. It's also very quiet. (The rear fan is on rubber pads, as are the hard drives.) Turning on AMD's Cool and Quiet feature in the bios and installing the driver to allow the CPU to dynamically change its clockspeed makes the system virtually silent for normal work (as the CPU throttles to 1 GHz when idle and the CPU fan slows way down). This seems to work very well. The clock speed immediately goes to 2210 MHz as soon as you do anything. (The only issue I've had with this is that SiSoft Sandra gets confused on the CPU tests and reports low scores unless you set the Cool and Quiet mode to "max performance".)
My first 3dMark 2001 run (with the carry over Radeon 9800 standard 128 MB card) gave a score of 18254, which is over 4000 points higher than my old system with the same card. I'm sure the score with a faster video card would be much higher.
The system itself feels extremely fast and boots Windows 2000 in about 30 seconds. (That's including the time it takes to initialize the raid array.) My biggest surprise was just how quiet the system is, even with 2 hard drives. That's mainly due to the Antec case and Truepower powersupply. They are both designed to be quiet. Add in AMD's Cool and Quiet dynamic CPU clock and fan speed adjustments and the loudest component in the system is the video card when the system is idle. Noise and heat are definately big advantages of AMD over Intel right now. The Prescott P4 systems I've worked with are anything but cool and quiet.
Basically I'd say once Asus gets a few more bios revisions out for this board, which hopefully will improve DDR400 memory compatibility and ease of use, I would have no hesitation in recommending it. Right now I think an experienced builder wouldn't have any issues with it, but a beginner would probably get confused about all the things you need to change in the bios before installing Windows to get good performance.
