Intel motherboard are good at what they're designed to do. That is, they're very stable runnning your Intel CPU at stock speed. Unfortunately, they're also pretty expensive for boards that ONLY do that.
You're MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better off buying a motherboard from Abit or Asus. They'll let you overclock your Intel CPU, for HUGE performance gains and your system will still be rock-solid stable... as long as you don't overclock the CPU to insane limits!
Personally, I have a 2.4 GHz Intel P4 CPU running at 3.2 GHz on an Abit IC7-Max3 motherboard. Basically, I have achieved a 800 MHz overclock, just by changing a couple of settings in the system BIOS. Compare the price of a 2.4 GHz processor to a 3.2 GHz processer, and you'll see why people love to overclock. Also, you don't need any fancy cooling unless you're overclocking to insane limits. I'm just using the stock heatsink/fan combo that came for free with the Intel processor, and I'm still getting an 800 MHz overclock.
There are other HUGE benifits to overclocking too, that I won't go into [i.e., faster memory transfer and front-side-bus (FSB) speeds]. Read this to understand what's involved:
http://www.overclockersclub.com/overclockingfaq.php
Check out these motherboard manufacturer web-sites:
http://www.abit-usa.com/http://usa.asus.com/index.htm
Then, go www.pricegrabber.com or www.nextag.com to compare prices between online vendors. Or, just buy from www.newegg.com
There is no way I would EVER by a new motherboard now, that didn't have the ability to overclock. You just get more performance from whatever CPU you're gonna use for free!
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