Got yet another board that I'll be trying out tonight, probably with a new power supply, as I think my PS may be what's eating motherboards. I just tested the board here at work, and it does boot. So we'll see what happens. I did get to play a wee bit of NS on my girlfriend's computer last night. After much tweakage I got NS to run in D3D mode in 640x480 and with NO special nice effects at ALL. I totally sucked with that hideous frame rate and with her generic unresponsive two button mouse. But I did at least get half of a game in before she came home and started screaming at me for using her computer!
So we'll see what happens tonight...
Edit: Okay, I tried the second board from work. It ALSO is screwed up. There's probably a reason these boards are sitting in a pile in the back instead of being used in computers. However a friend of mine whom you might have seen as 'Admojostrator' on the forums here lent me a working P3 board and chip, and the SDRAM to go with it. So then all I had to do was load up XP on another hard drive (it refused to read my 160 GB drive correctly) and now I'm finally up and running... With just a ton of drivers to update, steam and half life and a million games to reinstall, a good web browser, IRC... I'm in for a long night.
BUT! It's working for the moment!