Hi,

As a general rule,

1. Use as new a distribution as available. New motherboards may not be
supported on older versions. When I bought my system, making sound
work on FC6 was a pain. FC7 installation, 3 months later, was very
smooth.

2. Corporate distributions like RHEL support less varied hardware.
Stability is critical for them.
Check the redhat site for supported hardware - https://hardware.redhat.com/
If RHEL is critical, select the hardware from the supported list. It
is safer and will save time.

3. Distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu are more likely to work on a
wider range of hardware. Knoppix is also very useful for testing and
diagnosing hardware issues.

Regards
Anil