I'm too lazy to think about this IDE problem, but...
-The Slot A boards used a slightly different electrical arrangement than the Socket A ones. I forget the details, but it suggests that pushing the FSB is a little trickier (if you're used to Socket A boards, where it was a piece of cake).
-I can confirm that the K7M has some delightful ACPI quirks, some of which may be worse in the final beta BIOS release for it. In fiddling with power management under DragonFly, I managed to get it into a nice 'fire hazard' state - the system woke, but not the CPU fan(s).
-Do you have a manual handy? This is a pretty 'classic' board, and there's a PCI slot interrupt-sharing map to be aware of.
Edit: Oh yeah, this thing can't handle '32x4' or whatever the common "high density" SDRAM is. So if you want to use SDRAM sticks >128MB, you basically suffer the same limitations of the old 440BX. If you spend through the nose for name-brand motherboard-matched RAM (e.g. Kingston), you'll be okay, of course. (And I now notice someone else already said that, but the issue is more annoying and befuddling than 'sidedness.')
