there is a 939 board that is recommended by digi on there site. 754 is the old socket adn now the modile socket for athlon 64's 940 is the OLD athlon 64 socket and now the Opteron Socket. PCI express shouldn't make a difference. Just use anything off the recommendation list and you should be good. Setup? Just make sure you have a system drive and a seperate drive for recording. I have 2 SATA drives and i haven't had a problem with them... I can write 32 tracks at a time with plugins running and it doesn't choke. Now that dual core is supported and you can use more plugins i think it wouod be save to say that 2gbs of ram is a good idea since we will be ale to get about 2 times the plugins count. And also 939 is the only Athlon socket that uses Dual-core for Athlon 64's unless you get a dual core opteron. Hope this helps.