Sorry Rob, have to disagree with you here.

While I agree that Asus is on top of the food chain, sometimes they are too quick in releasing new boards and then the boards end up with bugs. Mostly fixable with a new bios, but sometimes a solder iron is needed (I had that happen to me once)

Aopen on the other hand has never let me down. I myself am using the AX4PE Max right now in a watercooled system, letting a P4 2.4Ghz run at 3Ghz. It's rock-stable.

Even better news might be that the Aopen is also cheaper than the Asus.

I've had (up till now) 5 Asus boards en 6 Aopen boards. Of those 5 Asus boards, 2 of them failed one way or the other. One had a dodgy keyboard connector and one was actually missing a capacitor (It had to be soldered on manually) and because of this was unstable as hell. Asus fixed this with a new factory revision of that motherboard in the end.

A friend of mine who has a PC shop actually stopped selling Asus boards (except on special order) because their RMA rate was so high. He now sells Aopen almost exclusively and I can't say I blame him. Of all the systems he built last year with Aopen boards (1000+), only TWO were DOA's.

Aopen boards arrive usually a little later with the newest chipsets, but every board I've ever had by them has been extremely reliable. Their slower ETA has a lot to do with this IMHO. I believe Aopen's boards are tested more thoroughly before they are shipped out.