Current Cost: $181
Months on list: 3
Price Change: -$1
ASUS has long held a reputation for quality and stability. We definitely don't want you to have to chase down stability issues when you could be breaking some clan record in Quake 3. It makes sense that we would suggest a Pentium 4 mainboard from ASUS.
The P4T is the flagship i850 board from ASUS. Doing away with ISA entirely, the board offers 1 4X AGP Pro slot and 5 PCI slots. It has 4 RIMM slots for maximum RAM upgrade ability and has chipset UDMA ATA/100 that guarantees speed and compatibility with today's fastest IDE drives. ASUS has even taken the i850 reference design to new heights with an adjustable FSB, which should make overclocking the Pentium 4 a breeze. Not to mention that so far this motherboard is the leader in speed on the P4 platform, it's the fastest darn mobo there is for the P4. We are however keeping an eye on the Abit TH7 but right now the Asus P4T wins hands down.
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Current Cost: $163
Months on list: 1
Price Change: -$15
Making a comeback this month was one of the first commercial boards based on the AMD 761 chipset, the ASUS A7M266 immediately earned our respect in terms of performance. It may have been new to our lab, but it quickly became the board to beat on initial benchmarks and still is.
We are however keeping a close eye on the development of the MSI KT266Pro. There have been some current issues with BIOS and performance problems. Because of the scarcity and lack of solid reviews from this new motherboard we did not include it into this guide. We are watching for further development of this board to see if it will replace the Asus A7M266. But right now the Asus A7M266 is pretty much the best motherboard to buy this month for the High-End gaming system.