Any experience with "Asus A8N-SLi" or "Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI" mobos?

[Joseph Koshy]

> My main, if not only problem is the NIC being so unreliable.

You may want to upgrade to 5.3-STABLE.

I installed 5.3-RELEASE on an ASUS K8V (which has the same
NIC).  I kept the following loop running in the background

  while :; do
  sleep 20
  ifconfig sk0 down
  ifconfig sk0 up
  done

this kept the network driver usable while I downloaded
the -stable tree.

A make world later, the box was stable.

If you don't want to change your userland, you could probably
get by recompiling the kernel with an 5.3-STABLE version of
"if_sk.c".  I haven't tested this though.

-- 
FreeBSD Volunteer, http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy