For anybody who is looking to upgrade their computer, but not sure of a motherboard, the 2 I have always recommended were Abit and Asus. I have used Asus since 99 and they have always been rock solid. I finally retired my Asus CUBX last night in favor of a Microstar. It has been a great little system. Never failed me.

For the past year we have been using Microstar motherboards for all of our Unix servers at work. These are very high demand servers we use. Thousands and thousands of hits daily, running FreeBSD, Red Hat, Solaris, you name it.

Previously, I would never use Microstar because I never heard of them. Well, in the year we have beaten them down in servers, not a single one has died. No problems at all.

I just upgraded my machine to a 2 ghz with a Microstar RAID motherboard, and it rocks. It has almost identical features of an Asus I was looking at, and it rated about the same, but it cost about $20 less.

One final note: never switch hardware with XP Pro installed. I had it going for a few weeks, then upgraded last night from my Pentium III 800 to a Pentium 4 2 ghz. XP IMMEDIATELY crashed. I knew it was shit, but this proves it.

One of my previous systems that I built for home use used a Microstar 6163 mobo and it was rock solid. Great boards. I've also used Asus and have no complaints there either.

I have a Soltek mainboard under the hood. It has run the past two years with no probs. Like you aaron I also went for Asus in the past, mainly because of their reputation, but this Soltek has really surprised me in a positive way :) For the records it's a "Soltek SL-75kv+" running with a Athlon Thunderbird 900 Mhz.