I was just wondering if you could get a M/Board to work at the same speed under a Linux system as what you could with a M$ system. <-- Of course you can. Compiling a kernel tailored to the chipset on your board will help this. For compatibility across multiple boards and chipsets, installer programs stick you with a generic linux kernel that will run so-so on almost any motherboard. There is also a tool called "hdparm" that you can use to tune your harddrives for optimal speed which helps a lot. The kernel doesn't really try to do too much guessing about your disk's capabilities, but you can tune it yourself for better performance. I'm not aware of much other tuning of the motherboard for speed, aside from getting things set properly in the bios.
As long as the bios settings are correct, Linux should run as well or better than Windows. Both get their processor and motherboard bus speeds fed to them by the bios, so there really isn't much to do there, but you can monkey around with the disk settings and get better throughput than what the generic kernel is set for. If you have newer disks, the difference in speed and access time can be like night and day.
