A nice small lab server with horsepower for several virtual machines.
Very quiet and cool machine (only 62W when idling).
Note: I choose Asus again for the motherboard since I have been satisfied with them before: a P4C800-E Deluxe, a barebone Asus Terminator T2-P Deluxe, and this M3A32-MVP Deluxe from 2008. The new machine is actually a replacement for the P4C800-E box, which "expired" in december 2009 after six years of constant use. But I don't think I will buy Asus again unless they shape up. Read below for my reasons.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend anyone to buy this motherboard+RAM combo. I spent five frustrating days before I got the parts working together. This involved obtaining a second motherboard with an earlier BIOS revision, trying all 20 different ways of placing one or both RAM sticks in the four slots on the motherboard (and then once again on the second board), upgrading to the latest BIOS, buying a cheap non-ECC RAM in order to reach the BIOS at all, creating a FreeDOS boot disk, patching the BIOS flasher "AFUDOS" so that it allows downgrading the BIOS version (grrrrr) and downgrading the BIOS version.
But here are some tips if someone wants to try anyway. You have been warned.
This is what finally worked for me for one particular board:
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx in "/etc/init.d/boot.local" (or wherever your operating system looks for such commands). Replace xx:xx:... with a real MAC address. Or at least a reasonably convincing MAC address. The original MAC address is ED:0B:00:00:E0:00 which is bogus and doesn't work. I don't know if it was wrong from the beginning, or if it broke by my reflashing BIOS. Asus does not provide any tool that sets (or resets) the MAC address so that it persists between boots.
Neither the motherboard nor the case contains a built-in speaker or beeper, so in order to be able to do the initial troubleshooting (when it didn't even pass the power-on self test), an 8W 0.5Ω speaker with a motherboard connector was needed. I managed to salvage one from an older ATX case.
If you only intend to use the computer as a headless home/office server, be sure to set "Internal Graphics Mode" to "SIDEPORT" in the BIOS. Otherwise the default is to steal about 256MB from the system RAM.
PS. The two motherboards mentioned above are actually the second and third boards involved in this little adventure. The first one I ordered is still lost inside some black hole at the DHL terminal in Rosersberg.
