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"Given ASRock's description..."

AsRock mentions fixes for AsRock Intel processor motherboards in one of the most badly designed web pages I've seen: Intel Firmware vulnerability INTEL-SA-00086.

This one is somewhat well known too, a bit overpowered but with protection features if you use it in an actual car

http://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX...

Wow, I'm seeing there are others / new ones in the Pico PSU form factor too. i.e. some have wide input voltage range and thus built-in converter/regulator (because your battery will go 13V, 12V, 11V, 10V...), others just say "input 12V" and are made with a power brick or laptop PSU plugged to the mains in mind.

i.e., to be 100% specific : this one is specifically advertised for running from a car battery or in a car (or in a truck), where a "picoPSU-90" at half the price is not. (I will suppose the picoPSU-90 is exactly what's needed if you have very clean and close to 12V power to start with)
http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX...

This is funny too : http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC-U...
garbage input in (random vehicle's 12V or 24V), stable DC voltage of your choosing out (5V to 24V)

This a mini ITX motherboard with DC 19V in! (meant to be used with 19V laptop PSU, or can be used with power "conditioned" with a thing like the one above)
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...

a bit more power hungry than an Atom system (cheap Celeron/Pentium soldered systems are rebranded Atom. sic)

Although, if you choose the right Pico PSU or similar, motherboards with only ATX power input will do.

And it turns out that people were still launching boards with AGP in 2010. You can probably still buy one...

Most of ASRocks high end motherboards including the X99's and Z97's have the 4x PCIe msata card already. I'm running one of these boards with a Samsung XP941 and getting the same speeds as the new MacBooks. http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel... plus http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-... and you're done. 1300+ mb/s SSD speeds on a desktop.

You have many motherboards options with latest gen hardware and a parallel port, still.
That may work if your software is so backwards it needs to think the parallel port is attached to the ISA bus.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...

You have many motherboards options with latest gen hardware and a parallel port, still.
That may work if your software is so backwards it needs to think the parallel port is attached to the ISA bus.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...

You have many motherboards options with latest gen hardware and a parallel port, still.
That may work if your software is so backwards it needs to think the parallel port is attached to the ISA bus.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...

I only skimmed the "horror stories", but as you said, they seem to be mostly about problems with updating the BIOS. The actual hardware support should work out of the box under Linux in nearly all cases, unless you want to get at really specific motherboard features. If you think you need those, you should know which ones exactly (they are probably the reason you'd chose this particular motherboard), and do some research if there are Linux drivers available.

Asrock offers BIOS updates for "Instant Flash" without an OS (e.g. Z97, random model). When I bought an Asrock motherboard some years ago, they didn't offer this for the particular model I bought, so I emailed their support. They mailed back that the BIOS update could be dangerous for early steppings of this board and this was the reason it was not publicly available; told me how to figure out my stepping, and gave me a link to an "Instant Flash" image I could use at my own risk. Can't complain about this.

So if you are worried about BIOS updates, it works just fine with Asrock motherboards according to my experience.

There's also a tool called "flashrom" that can flash the BIOS directly under Linux, but it doesn't work with all motherboards.

Rubbish, obviously a ZFS noob.

You can set up mechanisms to have errors reported to you immediately via so many method, the moment a drive fails, some chassis also have hdd fail alarm built inside the backplanes.

CPU is a moot point, things have been constantly improving both on hardware (cpu/chipset) and software (kernel/drivers/daemons).

Raid cards also waste more electricity than dumb HBAs and especially waste more electricity than on board sata chips, see motherboard with 12 sata ports.

There are no reason to use raid cards unless you are too jaded to adapt to ZFS.

Nope, there's no such thing as a Z77 board with PATA and Floppy

How many high-end boards have you looked at? I can't find a single one that *DOESN'T* have a 9-pin connector on the board (usually labelled COM). Just attach one of these

Also, get a load of this: Floppy port on a current-gen gaming board! What'll they think of next?

I admit, it isn't one of their most exotic boards, but it suited my needs perfectly.

There was at least one motherboard
that had both agp and pcie, allowing for existing use of AGP until you decided to upgrade to pcie. Also, getting a mobo with onboard video can allow for redundancy with video...

That's exactly what I realized, and I waited for years until a platform came around that was affordable (looked into Pentium-M for desktop before but the price was really high) and could play decent video while keeping the power usage low... So I recently bought an ION PC (power use generally under 20watt), works like a charm (downloads my torrents better than my previous big-ass media-box which consumed closer to 200watt, I figured I'll have the investment back in 2 years based on power alone).

My next 'TV' will probably just be a large monitor without any TV-tuner at all... As long as it has HDMI it'll do.

The prices approach the price of Apple hardware. I'd rather get a Mac and run Linux on an open source VM.

I'd rather get an ASRock Ion 330 for over 100 quid less.

Oh wait... I did!

I'd rather have something like an asrock ion 330. Just as green, better, cheaper. http://www.asrock.com/nettop/index.asp

I have one of these Revos myself and really like it. Ditched Vista straight away to make room for Debian; and it's now acting as my little quiet server.
I haven't really bothered with video and such yet (no proper TV for that) but from what I'd seen the Revo with the Atom 230 might not be powerful enough for a lot of high-res video, but the Revo with the Atom 330 probably is.

Maybe the ASRock Ion 330 might be a better option for you?

You can buy about 4 ASRock IONs for that amount of cash. It has a bit lighter specs, but a much lighter price. And it's about the same size as a mac mini.

http://www.asrock.com/nettop/overview.asp?Model=ION%20330

ASRock does this in their newer boards.

http://www.asrock.com/feature/instantboot/

Unfortunately, I think it's only available in Windows, and it's only usable if you're in a single-user environment with no password required on login.

I'd love to see Linux implement it the way you just described though.

Asrocks 4CoreDual-VSTA http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=4CoreD ual-VSTA motherboard supports DDR & DDR2, 4x PATA & 2x SATA, AGP & PCI-Express. Put your old bits on that board and link it up to a new Dual Core CPU. It's not a great board but it will help you over the upgrade jump.

If I'd gone Intel, I'd have had to get DDR2 memory, which would have basically doubled the price for similar performance. As it was, I could re-use the memory I had.

There are motherboards that allow you to use DDR RAM with a Core 2 Duo CPU (example: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Dua l-VSTA&s=n ), I believe Anandtech or Toms Hardware had some benchmarks that showed the performance difference from using DDR RAM in one of these boards was negligable.

Just not at the same time as DDR. ASRock site And besides, if you already have DDR and then you buy this board, you're no more "stuck" with DDR than you were before you bought it.

It's a terrific board at an incredible price. The only reason I didn't buy one is that it's reportedly tough to install current Linux versions on it.

I bought that board last week. One big selling point was that it has both AGP x8 and PCI-E x16 slots, meaning I don't have to upgrade also my video card before I want. It's a sweet mainboard.

I'm in the same situation, but I found that there are actually motherboards that support both PCI-E and AGP, so initially I only need to replace the CPU and motherboard. The motherboard I'm planning on buying is the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard: http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-SATA2.htm

If all you cared about was speed, you'd go eSATA2 instead of USB or firewire, right? This product seems way expensive for a solution that doesn't even offer an eSATA- or LAN-connection

I'm in the progress of doing an hardware upgrade, and while I don't care one iota about Vista, I know that my motherboard is sold as "Windows Vista Hardware Ready". Not sure exactly what that means in practice, I guess it's just marketing.

Ideally, I'd like to see a system with both an AGP and a PCI-E expansion port
You mean, a board like this: http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-880Pro.htm
or this, for the AMD crowd: http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-SATA2.htm

Ideally, I'd like to see a system with both an AGP and a PCI-E expansion port
You mean, a board like this: http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-880Pro.htm
or this, for the AMD crowd: http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-SATA2.htm

Get one of these boards (I got one for $50 two years ago), an old P4 (1.6 or so), a cheap Seagate 120G hard drive (about $100 a year ago), some memory (sorry, no clue about the price for this one, but the boards I mentioned support SDRAM, so...), and you are done!

Oh, forgot to mention that you'll also need a case and a 200W power supply!