ABIT IP35 Pro LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Booted right up with no issues at all. LCD on MB very helpful in troubleshooting issues if after tweaking BIOS it doesn't POST. CMOS reset switch on the back input panel very useful as well. Handles my overclock with ease. Comes with all the cables you need so don't worry if you buy OEM drives without cables. Came with the latest BIOS version (14) and abit's uguru software on the CD is actually a newer version than on the website (this is a first for me). Plenty of auxiliary fan plugs on the MB - I don't use even half of them.

Cons: The firewire plugs are situated in a place (see pictures) where a large 2 slot video card like the 8800GTX will block 1 or both plugs. I just barely got the firewire plug for the front panel of the P180B into the motherboard. There's no way I can use the 2nd plug. But then I don't own any firewire drives so it's not that big a deal. Just a FYI for everyone else. LAN cards use PCI bus instead of PCI-Express so if you have extreme network demands, you may want to look into how this might affect performance. For overclockers, be careful of vdroop. It seems to be a bit higher than I'd like but thankfully the Q6600 is such an awesome processor. More on vdroop and my settings below.

Overall Review: I'm running: Q6600 OCed to 3.2 GHz (8x400), Crucial Ballistix 2x1GB DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 (BL2KIT12864AA804), EVGA 8800GTX, 2 SATA HD's (WD3200AAKS) and a SATA dvd burner (Samsung SH-S203B). I set vcore to 1.325 and it vdroops down to 1.3 while idling and at load it goes down to around 1.25-1.28, but stays completely stable. I've seen it at 1.24 before too. Note 1.275 is the stock voltage and my Q6600 is OCed 33%! But that's a virtue of the CPU. I've found Newegg's user review system is very consistent in pointing out reliable products. After doing my own research, I decided to go with Abit for my P35 board because of neglible differences between Abit and the other brands. Why? This board consistently gets 5 eggs compared to the others with 4. Another thing - if you're getting blue screens it's very likely something's not getting enough voltage or your BIOS settings are messed up. Try resetting CMOS and make incremental changes to determine where the problem is.

Pros: The features this board has are amazing, the lan features are awesome, as is the layout, chipset cooling, back panel cooling, and so on.

Cons: ALOT. IDE Drives fail to show up consistently, showing up and disappearing from WinXP as the please but always showing up in the BIOS. Customer Service is horrible, I'll never buy another Abit product. Also, the on board sound is the RealTek AC97 Codec, anyone who knows it will tell you it has a million compatibility issues. Can't run UT3 due to the AC97 compatibility issues, so on and so on..

Overall Review: RMA-ing this as we speak, used to love Abit, now I'll never buy again.