Pros: It's a high-powered, no-holds-barred beast when it's not crashing.

Cons: I can play games on the Sapphire Radeon 4870 for anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours before it locks up the display in a checkerboard pattern, forcing a hard reboot. This is on a newly installed copy of WinXP Pro and a 750 watt PSU. From what I understand, the crashes have something to do with how AMD/ATI's power saving feature called PowerPlay is rapidly changing the GPU's core clock speed when using 3D applications (i.e., games). This seems to be a driver issue, and it is fixable with a little tweaking, but to release a product that is essentially broken in terms of its primary purpose (playing ganes) is bad form and insulting to the consumer.

Overall Review: Check out the AMD/ATI forum regarding the crash-prone Sapphire 4870 before you buy, and it may well change your mind. Also, take some advice from me and learn from my mistake. I would have RMAed this card days ago, but Newegg will not accept the return of a product that is missing its serial number from the packaging (even though the serial number is printed on the card itself as well). The first thing I did after receiving the Sapphire 4870 was to clip the serial number and mail it in to get my rebate, only to discover later that this card has serious issues for many people. Don't make the same mistake - either put the scissors down until you're sure the card works to your satisfaction, or better yet, buy a different brand to begin with.

Pros: Having onboard video, LAN, and sound in one package is nice for a small server solution.

Cons: Got a kernel panic when attempting to install Red Hat EL 5 on the M2N-MX. After some research, discovered that I needed to pass a parameter to the kernel to disable the board's jacked-up APIC functions. This gets Linux installed. I then discover that there is a problem with how the board is reporting memory mapped PCI devices to the kernel. Evidently this is causing random lockups on some installations, so I disable this "feature" with another kernel boot parameter. Then I notice that the onboard nVidia MCP61 ethernet controller is reporting a different MAC address everytime the system boots, which basically junks my network configuration and forces the use of default values. There is some discussion about the latest driver release from nVidia correcting this issue, but with all the other stop-gaps I'm having to employ (and there ARE more), I haven't had time to try this yet. The manual is also just plain wrong in several places, explaining BIOS featues that don't exist, etc.

Overall Review: There are better boards for Linux. Although this particular Asus board gets good reviews here, my experience has been disappointing. I will look at other brands for my next Linux box.