Thanks for the suggestion. I found a still new Abit AN7, and it's on the way. It's a tough one to find these days. especially new. I reviewed the side-by-side comparison of the Asus A7N8X to the Abit AN7 on
http://techreport.com/articles.x/6470/1, and they are a virtual tie in memory bandwidth tests, PATA and SATA performance, several gaming tests, and USB 2.0 read and write performance. They did not use an Asus board with firewire support, so the comparison was not made with firewire, but they noted the read scores for firewire on the AN7 trounced the USB 2.0 scores with much lower CPU utilization. Duh. The AN7 was a bit slower in CPU utilization in USB and firewire, but all in all, it looks like an excellent board and I like the addition of a firewire port on the I/O.
I'm looking forward to plugging the XP2800 Barton in the AN7 and seeing what she'll do.