Don't buy the Abit IN9 32X-Max motherboard

<rant>
This is a terrible motherboard and it shows that Abit have gotten even worse in quality control. Asus for me next time or this time if they don't manage to fix this soon.

The official and beta BIOS images available for it are all incredibly buggy. If you change some of the options like USB keyboard/mouse to be handled by the BIOS instead of the OS then it freaks out and will hang or crash on boot. The only way I've gotten this board to boot Windows reliably is to reset CMOS and just go with the defaults for everything.

The actual layout of the board is a bit suspect as well. It is designed to run 2 nVidia cards in SLI mode. The issue is that one of the board power connectors is just under where you'd plug in the second card. I had to root around to find an extra short Molex plug and extension cable to fit. The ones on my PSU are just too tall for it to be able to fit.
</rant>

I bought a Dell 2407FPW as well and its great. I was considering the 30" model instead but it was twice as expensive and I don't really have the desk space for it either.

I would reconsider buying Asus if I were you. Not that Asus is extremely bad, it's just that they are always the first on the market with new models of new chipsets, and those models are usually awful. After the first few months, Asus then (quietly) revises the hardware a couple of times, after which the boards usually end up to be pretty good. Just make sure not to buy one of the first boards of any new Asus series. The fallout rate of those is immense.

I've made that mistake a couple of times now already, and every time if felt like an Asus beta tester...

I've switched to Gigabyte a couple of generations ago, and haven't regretted it (yet? )

Quote:
Not that Asus is extremely bad, it's just that they are always the first on the market with new models of new chipsets, and those models are usually awful.

Things you don't want to read about your rather expensive Supermicro 370DE6 motherboard: http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?threadid=6093

Fortunately the only really broken peripherals were AGP, and IDE DMA (though it was a bit picky with its PC133 SDRAM). As I had SCSI drives and a PCI video card, it served as a very solid workstation for many years and I only retired it the other month in favour of the Macintosh.

Peter