Current Cost: $190
Months on list: New

It seems as if ASUS motherboards have been a tradition of our cutting-edge system recommendations for as long as we can remember. Given our new requirement for a mPGA 478 motherboard, choosing an ASUS board is simply not an option. The i845 rush has hit hard and most manufacturers have left the RDRAM platform unattended at least for the time being. ABIT is one company that has produced a high-performance i850/RDRAM motherboard for the new Pentium 4 processors so we're going with the TH7II-RAID as our pick. This board has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in, such as 4 RIMM sockets, 1 AGP 4X, 1 CNR and 5 PCI slots, ABIT's powerful SoftMenu III BIOS for overclocking and tweaking, and a HighPoint IDE RAID controller. There is not much more you could want in a performance Pentium 4 motherboard, and the TH7II-RAID is probably the most fully-featured i850 board you can buy.

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Current Cost: $160
Months on list: New

We are also making a change from ASUS over to ABIT for the AMD system as well. The ASUS A7M266 is getting a bit long in the tooth and has had no major revisions in some time. This is certainly not the case with the ABIT KG7-RAID, which is a brand new design including all the features you have come to expect from ABIT. One that is likely to please is the inclusion of 4 DIMM sockets (!), so that upgrading memory is no longer a case of trying to fit 3 DDR DIMMS into only 2 available DIMM sockets. As time goes by, these 4 DIMM sockets may become very useful, especially since the KG7-RAID supports up to 4 GB of system memory. The KG7-RAID also features 1 AGP and 6 PCI slots, a full SoftMenu III BIOS, and in case that wasn't enough, it also includes a HighPoint IDE RAID controller for good measure. After a bit of a lull in motherboard R&D, ABIT is continuing to impress us with their new and innovative designs.