Hi I am looking for a bit of recent motherboard experience here. I have figured out the cause of the crash's of the Nvidia closed src drivers during my recent i386 V AMD64 experimnents. The problem almpst certainly being a buggy motherboard. The board concerend is a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5. Its always given a little bit of trouble including problems with the hardrives and one particular graphics card (Radeon HD7870) will not work in text mode, graphics mode though being OK. In both cases the equipment concerned has worked OK on other MB's. Search's on the net also said the some of the early X79 chipsets had some problems. Now I have decided after some thought to replace the MB and have narrowed the search down to 2 examples the first is a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4, this being an almost perfect direct dropin replacement. The second is an ASUS P9X79 Pro. The reasons for considering the ASUS are firstly I am slightly gun shy of Gigabyte boards due to current problem, second I have two other systems that use ASUS P6X58 pro MB's, these being the previous generation of the X79 boards and these boards have given no trouble and been excellent performers. Third the ASUS boad is slightly more "future proof". Now the question is only minor, the ASUS webs site says the board is only rated for windows 7 and latter although the site does provide drivers for Windows XP. The System has (of course) Linux installed, currently this is Debian Sid i386, with the NVidia closed src driver installed and working OK. Windows XP is also installed, Now the question (finally???) is is there likely to be any problem's installing XP on this newer board. Its not a real great tragedy if one cannot install it but it would be nice to have. I would normaly search the net for the answers for this kind of problem but the dial up line though make this far to slow these days as the net currently expects everyone to have highspeed broadband (my high speed access currently being out of service). Using Linux for now over 20 years, Lindsay