Good evening MASH,
I have not frequented this board in quite some time. This will be my first post in about a year. However, I have been quite active in building PCs.
Frankly, in my personal experience I would highly recommend ASUS motherboards, and DFI motherboards. The ASUS motherboards have very thorough manuals, and they are very high quality. The DFI boards, which is a chinese company, seems to be a bit lacking in the manual, but their board is rock solid. Don't let the UV on, Tweak Fun! Slogan fool you; mine has been rock solid. I highly recommend ASUS deluxe motherboards and DFI Lanparty series motherboards. I also have to tell you that the ABit boards (fatality included) are very nice as well. Just be careful with that silly little pronged chip in the Fatality board, I actually may suggest staying away from the Fatality board if they still have that SLI on/off chip on the board..we broke the prongs on one side of ours installing. After seeing how the SLI worked in software configs, it was safe to assume however that removing and switching the chips side was not even needed to begin with
.
Also, I would suggest the new 939 architecture AMD motherboards, depending on your pricerange, and might I suggest the more heat-efficient san diego, X2, etc., Smaller pinset over the old clawhammer.
Also note, now may be a time to wait until ATI unveils it's crossfire series boards, but I have not looked into it too much to know when that will be. I can say that it will be featured in the new Xbox 360s next month and therefore shouldn't be too far off.
--The Fox
