I was big on ASUS until I got royally screwed by a motherboard that they refused to support. Thus I was out 120 bucks on a lemon. But you have to take that with a grain of salt. EVERY manufacturer is going to have their "black sheep" model once in a while. For the most part, I think GB/ASUS/Abit/MSI are great companies. You just have to do your homework and read up on reviews. For instance, I find newegg consumer reviews to be very informative because you can look for failure trends and know what symptoms to expect in the event that you get a lemon. Then simply RMA.
For a while I dealt a lot in Gigabyte and occasionally MSI. MSI is a solid brand and Gigabyte is pretty good as well. Only problems that I've had with Gigabyte is on their later boards; I've run into small bios quirks (i.e. Setting warnings 'n such). For instance, I had a bios flash freeze up (faaaaaaack) and the back up chip (dual bios setup) COULDN'T restore it! Kind of annoying because that's the whole point of having a dual bios... but whatever... This only happened to one out of the dozen GB boards I've setup/used.
For a recommendation/review:
I also have the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium in my current machine and it's been nothing short of roses. SLI (PCI-E), nForce4, external SATA ports, RAID options, dual channel memory support. I personally have had nothing but luck with it, but there are a handful of reports of people getting a dead board out-of-the-box. The failure precentage is low, and if it doesn't work, newegg is really good with RMAs. Fantastic board, though.
