Asus has the "plus" of providing regular BIOS updates and stuff, which helps as new CPUs come to market. But they tend to omit details such as back-panel SPDIF connectors and such. I have a P5B-VM mobo that was in our PVR originally.

It has since been replaced by a Foxconn mobo, which has buggy DSDT tables (ACPI BIOS stuff), but otherwise works reasonably well in the PVR. The back panel optical SPDIF is how we connect it to the 5.1 amp/speaker system. But its back panel eSATA port has never worked -- the BIOS never sees drives on it, and neither does Linux.

Both boards were chosen for their PCIe plus 2 PCI slots in a mATX form factor to fit the Antec Fusion case.

So, hohum average rating from me on either.

Cheers