Ok, I got my nice new shiny equipment, and I hooked it all up, tried
installing Mandrake and it locks up at various places, always during heavy
disk activity (booting, or copying files).  I lowered the FSB to 100Mhz, and
that allowed me to get through the install after a couple of tries and I
finally got Mandrake installed.  

BTW, this is a Soyo Dragon Plus which has the KT266A and the VT8233ce
southbridge on it with an Athlon 1700+ and Micron PC2100 CAS 2 memory (2 256
MB sticks).

Anyway, after running the bonnie disk benchmarking utility, the machine
locks up during the test.  Occasionally, /var/log/messages will get several
hundred lines of binary data in it when it locks.  I've also tried
installing FreeBSD and Windows 2000, and it locks with both of those also.
I've removed all of my extra peripherals except for my video card, disabled
all onboard stuff, changed every cable, changed the power supply, changed
the drive, tried each stick of RAM individually (small chance of BOTH sticks
being bad), and the only piece of hardware I haven't changed is the
motherboard and CPU.  I've also tried booting from the onboard Promise IDE
RAID Bus, and it still locks up.  It only locks during heavy disk activity,
but the problem doesn't happen as often if I run at 1100Mhz instead of the
default 1466Mhz.  I've even used the failsafe settings in the BIOS which
give "safe" settings to everything, and downgraded to the previous BIOS
version.  I've also tried using the board outside of the machine just in
case it was shorting against the chassis somewhere.

Is there something I'm overlooking here?  Or do I have a bad board?  A
friend of mine has the same setup except with Corsair memory and his works
fine.  I'm going to try his memory tomorrow, and maybe his CPU.  

I have another board on its way from mwave.com (their customer service is
damn good, very painless RMA).  I can't say the same for Tran Micro about my
memory though.  I was told that if I tried my friend's memory and it works,
that Tran would only exchange my memory for more Micron or sell me
registered Infineon 512MB sticks for double the price, and if it didn't work
with my system, too bad because it works with everything they sell.  I don't
think I'll be buying memory from Tran anymore. 

Jay