I'm picking out a Motherboard for you! Not an ordinary Motherboard for you!
Argh, I'm putting together a new PC for playing around at home. I've been using my Gateway laptop for the past year, and it has worked fine. I just need more power (laptop is a PIII 1.2GHz) for VMWaring, VS.Net and the ever important Sim City 4. So I dig around and decided to go with a motherboard built on the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset. It's getting some good reviews and also shows some excellent performance, along with the added bonus that it has on board LAN, Video and Sound. I specifically went with the Leadtek WinFast K7NCR18G due to its dual CRT feature built in. A risky motherboard manufacture, I know.
Well, I paid for it. The board works great; with one stick of ram. I throw in two sticks, the thing won't install Windows XP giving me some STOP error message about ACPI. Either stick by themselves works fine, and installing the normal, non-ACPI HAL also works fine. But both sticks + ACPI = no windows install (or instant reboot if I install with one stick, and then stick the other in after the fact). Now, it seems to be working at 266mhz frequency on the ram, but this is PC27000 so it should work fine at 333mhz. And having both sticks working is also important because of the "DualDDR memory architecture." Those stinkers.
Not to mention my IBM harddrives are some high pitched SOBs. I'm thinking about replacing those with one of the Western Digital "Special Edition" drives. So, I'll probably replace this mobo with an Asus or Epox board, plus a Geforce4 MX video card, and get a new harddrive. Additional cost to the already $900 bucks spent: ~$250. Oh well, I realized I forgot to write off my student loan interest which should yield me another $500 bucks on my tax return if I venture into H&R block or whoever it is that offers the free evaluation on your tax returns.
I'm also working on my dad's PC, and it's a PA-2013 running a K6-2 450. I'm thinking about seeing if he wants my Leadtek board, a single stick of ram and a proc for $300 bucks :)