Abit IC7 Motherboard

Pros: Stability. Feature set. Installation ease.
Cons: Inferior Northbridge heatsink.

The northbridge heatsink fan failed after 3 months. (This seems to be a well-known shortfall of ABIT boards.) They have several different models shipped with the board, and apparently I have one of the cheap old ones. I ordered a new one from "ABIT Parts." You pay for shipping and handling only.

Aside from that the board performs well. I run the board default with 3.2Ghz CPU and 2GB RAM. Seems stable and well mannered. The IDE plugs are down on the S.E. corner of the board, which makes for interesting stretching and contortions to plug in drives. But it can be done, so be prepared for that.

Installation is fairly straight forward. If the price drops below a certain point, I may pick up another one (hopefully with the better heatsink) for a new build project.

Pros: 800 MHz FSB, on-board SATA RAID, on-board gigabit Ethernet. . . .
Cons: None I've found yet.

I bought this Abit mobo several months ago and have been loving it ever since. It was extremely easy to install, and everything is arranged in a very well thought out manner on this board.

If you're an overclocker, you should find this board quite to your liking. You can clock a 2.4GHz P4 up to ~3.1GHz with very minimal heat increases. As a matter of fact, I'm still using all manufacturer supplied heat-sinks/fans with no problems.

All tweaking can be done via the softmenu in the system BIOS. Jumpers can be left alone, and you can still do a lot of overclocking.

My favorite feature on this motherboard is the on-board RAID. I have two SATA drives from Seagate in a RAID 1 array, and suddenly my disk performance is no longer a bottleneck. Couple that with the AGP 8x, and the 800 MHz front side bus and you've got one heck of a gaming platform.

If you're looking to build your own high-end system, this is the board for you.