Off topic - mobo recommendations

[Tod Thomas]

I'm shopping for a new developer machine for which I'll be using Fedora 
as the development platform.  Its been about about 7-8 years since I 
built a machine from scratch but since then I've accumulated a lot of 
parts that ultimately could contribute to a nice box if I had the right 
motherboard.

I'm partial to AMD chips.  I'm not a gamer but I do like nice visuals 
and decent sound.  I've got a good video and sound card now but they are 
both 7-8 years old.  I suspect things have changed a lot and almost 
wonder if newer motherboards don't offer better on board now.  I plan on 
taking advantage of virtualization so I imagine memory and processing 
speed would be indicated.  Over the long run I always seem to run out of 
PCI slots or USB ports so that would be a premium.  Economy is also a 
bonus.  I don't mind paying for performance and extensibility but if I 
could get something pretty decent at a low cost maybe I could buy a 
couple and replace another older board I have running.  I also like 
BIOS's that are tweak friendly.

Right now the fastest machine in my fleet is an Intel Pentium M 1.4 GHz 
running on a dell laptop.  My desktop (development) is running an old 
AMD Thunderbird which I don't even think breaks 1GHz and has only .5Gb 
of onboard memory.

Sorry for off topic, just thought this might be the best place to get an 
idea of what everybody else is using since we all share interest in the 
same development platform.  Flame me directly, spare the list :)


Thanks - Tod