Abit KN9 Ultra problems

[MU_Engineer]

Hi, after reading your (rather glowing) review of the Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard, I figured it would be a good choice for a low-cost Linux box I wanted to build. However, I've had no end of problems trying to get it to run. I get kernel oopses and panics at seemingly random times(although usually involving disk I/O), and I can't figure out why. The memory appears to be fine; I've run memtest86 about 6 times and no errors turned up. I've tried swapping video cards, reseating the RAM and CPU, trying different hard drives, nothing seems to work. I even tried downgrading the BIOS to the version used in the review.

Were there any weird options that you had to pass to the kernel to get it to boot/run properly?

Other parts I used:
AMD Athlon64 3800+ (Orleans)
Western Digital 7200RPM SATA Hard drive
Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card(this isn't a gaming machine ), later replaced with an ancient ATI Rage PCI card
1GB(2x512MB) DDR2-800 RAM

Any tips or pointers would be appreciated.

I built a machine around the KN9S (very similar board) and I needed to put the option "noapic" in GRUB's boot prompt to get it to run. Now it happily runs Fedora 6 AMD64.

[TheQwe]

OK, it turned out to be the RAM after all. The memory I bought is advertised as DDR2-800 but only runs stably at DDR2-667.

Bleh. I hope I can still get a refund...