peterrock, i have a gigabyte board in the 478 socket flavor, running a p4 2.4@ 3.2Ghz on air, gigabyte makes a solid board. good choice. heres an intresting thing, 680i nvidia chip sets will in the future support 45nm cpus. guru3d obtained a beta bios from nvidia that allowed them to use the new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad-Core Processor ie. 45nm cpu =^) heres a link showing thay got a beta bios, http://www.guru3d.com/article/processor/471/2/ so dont limit yourself to a board other than 680i. im building a box for a client with that chipset. i can assure you the south bridge gets HOT!! north bridge is no slouch when it comes to cranking up the degrees either. I ran superPI mod for 8 hrs with no hiccups with a x6800@ 3.4 on air. as hot as thay got, nothing crashed or was unstable so.... TV components get hot like that too. tvs run forever for the most part. car stereos get extremely hot with out a problem i wouldn't worry about the heat issue unless you have poor case ventilation.