UPDATE: Turns out I was a little premature on my excitement. A few hours later, the motherboard cratered on me. Digging deeper reveals one of three common issues with this motherboard - a) the board refuses to recognize the video card's RAM, b), the board may not be getting enough power (even with a 485W PSU), and c) the motherboard does not supply enough voltage to the memory sticks (it supplies 1.9 volts, with more recent and performance memory requiring 2.0 or more). End result for me was to abandon the Asus M2N-E - it just wasn't working with the equipment I had. I ended up with an Asus M2NBP-VM/CSM. I think it was a slightly lower model, and has onboard video, but it works. I've been abusing the box for the past day and some with no issues.
Thanks for visiting Murphy. See you next time!
Today I returned the Asus M2N-E motherboard and exchanged it for another new one (same model). This time though, I decided not to cut corners, and also purchased a new CPU (an AMD X2-6000+) and had Memory Express mount the CPU for me. When they do these "quick mounts", they test things out to make sure they work, and flash the BIOS (update it). So, when I walked away from the store, I was reasonably confident the motherboard/CPU was functional.
When I installed the motherboard, I decided to test it out before I mounted RAM and everything else. Yep, I was getting "beep codes". That's a good sign as it means the motherboard is doing what it is supposed to. So I mounted the RAM and video card, connected the drives, and everything else. Then I crossed my fingers and hit the power switch. No joy, getting a beep code.
So I had to switch over to the laptop and do some research to figure out what the beep code meant. Surprisingly, this info is NOT in the motherboard manual. I found out that the motherboard uses an Award BIOS, so I did a Google search for "award bios beep code", and found what I needed. One long, three short beeps means a video problem. So I removed the video card, and reinstalled it (re-seating it), and the beep code issue went away.
So now I actually could see the POST process on my monitor. I entered the setup and configured it to meet my needs (more to tell it what drive to boot from). Restarted and let it boot into Linux. Damn that boot process is fast. Going from an AMD X2-3800+ (at 1.6 GHz) to an AMD X2-6000+ (at 3 GHz) is an amazing difference. And then I hit my last hurdle. Linux didn't want to boot into the graphical interface, and I was dropped to a command prompt. But this is a known issue - I just needed to reset X-Windows to use the right driver. So a simple "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", and selecting the "nvidia" driver instead of the "nv" driver did the trick. (How I know that is an indication of how many times this issue comes up. But if anyone were running into this the first time, they'd be facing a little work to find the right steps. Luckily there's lots of documentation on this on the web.)
One thing to note here. I DID NOT have to reinstall my operating system, even though I swapped out my motherboard and CPU for different models. This is a testament to Linux, Ubuntu, and the use of dynamic detection of what kernel modules are needed at boot time. If I were running another common operating system, I would have no choice but to reinstall from scratch AND get permission from that OS vendor to use the same license on the newer hardware.
So, I'm sitting here posting this on my brand spanking new motherboard and CPU, with the nice 64 bit OS I had installed just days before the Motherboard went south on me. I'm a happy camper now. :)