General rule: office-like PCs are not worth keeping and nforce chipsets were always poor in legacy support department. Plus it's probably a ticking time-bomb anyway, due to infamous Nvidia bumpgate.
But hats off to Asus, you can officially insert Phenom II X6 into that thing!

So you've got an Asus M2N68-LA (made for HP/Compaq) instead of M2N68 or M2N68-AM (retail versions with very different designs). Asus don't have M2N68-LA driver support on their website; you might have to check HP/Compaq for BIOS and drivers, although I wouldn't hold my breath for them.

IMHO if the MB has any defect (e.g. a bulging capacitor) then it's not worthy keeping.

Although this might sound complicated, you're much better off taking the Vendor and Device IDs for each triangle you'd see in Windows, and looking for the drivers that way.

Sounds a bit tedious but I managed to find a lot of drivers this way.

As for caps, they're easy to replace.

I'd personally keep it you can make nice compact XP system being it's matx. I've used alot of Nforce systems and I've had no issues with stability or performance.

did you get rid of it?

you're right about charity - they are onnly interested in relatively modern things

this old pc could still be fine online with a suitably light linux even with 2gb ram

always seems a shame to lose something that could still do things, but if not then we'd end up with 100 random computers in our living spaces

Heh, indeed I haven't gotten rid of it yet. And as luck would have it, I suddenly have a use for it.

I've been wanting to capture and digitize VHS tapes, but found the available USB-based solutions out there lacking. I want to be a perfectionist about this, and capture the original analog video in the most lossless way possible, so without any de-interlacing or lossy compression in between. Yes, I know the video quality of VHS is pretty crappy to begin with, but I don't want to degrade it any further. 😅

Then I suddenly remember I still have a couple of Hauppauge winTV PCI cards with the trusty BT878 chip, which will do that job nicely, including the ability to capture the original interlaced stream over an S-Video connection. And they work in Linux out of the box.

Of course that would require a computer with at least one legacy PCI slot, which this old beast still has. So I'll slap in a large SATA hard disk as well as one of those Hauppauge cards, and Bob should be my uncle (figuratively). 🙂

I also have an Asus Xonar PCIe sound card, which I'll probably put in the machine as well, to capture the audio. It might give better results than the on-board sound capturing capabilities of the nForce 430.

This machine should be beefy enough to take the uncompressed audio and video streams from the capture card, and compress them with lossless codecs, such as FFV1 and FLAC, and write them out on the fly.

I'll let you know how it went!

This would be an excellent use of this system.