I had / have (now using with centos, as a server) the prev gen of this board the ASUS M3N-HT DLX MEMPIPE AM2+.
With mandriva it works almost perfectly, but the usb sound chip used to occasionally give me trouble (ADI AD1988B).
that was the 780a nvidia chipset, with ddr2 memory.
so i would guess this ones going to be an upgrade of that board.
this one does not have that sound chip instead it has VIA VT1708S.
so what we need to do is look at the generic status of linux and these components
this link here says something about it, but aslo suggests what i did , to go for the amd 800/900 chipset instead.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.p ... 14373.htmltherefore without being able to test if i was picking from a store, i would be looking in the suggested price range at this.
ASUS M5A97 EVO AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
its not a 990FX like mine, but based on a slightly less featured 970 chipset, which drops the price to $114 instead of the $209 that the crosshair V formula is.
but its just as featured as the M4N98TD but does not have the PATA/IDE connection, although this can be fixed by buying one of these.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812232004 at only 11 dollars.
it has the following important components.
Realtek® 8111E , 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s) (i know this works with mga2 as its the same nic im testing on my jetway board.)
Realtek® ALC892 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC , not quite the alc889 of the crosshair, but i would suspect its close.
I cant promise either of these boards will work 100%, but as they share lots of similarities to hardware im using im pretty sure, you will have no trouble.
regards peter