@Rage
It seems you are deliberately misinterpreting me.
About the quote from the website
Of course Gigabyte are going to promote themselves on their own site. And the 2oz copper PCB is a waste if you aren't going to OC. And I doubt the OP will if he cares about reliability. ASUS don't even offer that, and its common knowledge that they are regarded as the most robust boards in existence.
A mainstream motherboard is pretty much what I think the OP wants. There is little point buying a ferrari to go shopping in, even if it is of "higher quality" and you'll find that your fiat punto is probably more reliable. Seeing as the OP had already failed at his last attempt to repair his PC, and wanted a PC that was fast for "general purposes" (I'm guessing day to day iTunes, Word etc) and didn't play games, or OC, I don't see the point in making him spend extra for things he doesn't need.
Win7 was purely an analogy of a new product on the market, and you seem to have failed to make the connection, nevermind.
And I was not changing the subject at all by making a price comparison. People live on a budget, and its entirely part of the subject if I choose to tell the OP that he can afford to get an even better processor if he does not invest in things he does not need at the whims of gaming PC builders. DDR3 may be overtaking DDR2 as you say, but the fact is it will be surpassed in 2 years and still has much lower chip yields than DDR2, making a large statement about its reliablity.
Ritwik makes a huge example of what I am saying by directing him to an SLi boeard even though he explicitly said he did not want his PC for gaming! I have built many PCs for non-gamers and the fact is, if you save $50 on not having SLi on your mobo, that can be the difference between an X3 and an X4, and unlike that unused slot (the OP should probrably use onboard anyway), that will actually benefit you.
@Rage
Thank you Rage_3K_Moiz for coming with some measurable and quantifiable points, I seem to have a hard time actually getting any good reasons from anyone else as to why they believe that AsRock is so inferior to ASUS and Gigabyte. For my old mobo I can completely see where you are coming from, as I can see its a 4 phase design, but even though my new board is 8 phase you may be correct in saying that there are little 16 phase AsRock solutions.
@OP
I think i have made my point, it seems there are many gamers around today who are convinced you want gaming parts. If you want something cost effective that will be fast and will last you a long while without needing to upgrade (remember that a gamers Idea of futureproof is that you will be able to put a newer faster part into it in 6 months, and I would hedge my bets you want your parts to last much longer than that), I would grab yourself and AsRock board, spend the rest on getting the fastest Phenom II processor you can, bag 8GB of RAM and slap it into your old case. you won't regret it.
In fact, I have so much trust in this company that I advise you to google Broken AsRock. The majority of the posts are not actually broken or are ancient Geforce 2 boards, and no-where near the quantity that you would get from broken Gigabyte, or even broken ASUS searches
![hellokitty[hk]](/community/data/avatars/m/169/169488.jpg?1355088591){kind=avatar}
But Win 7 has already gone gold and patches are still being released for it before it has even reached the release date.
