Current Cost: $195

ASUS' P4T i850 is our motherboard pick for the High-End Business PC Buyer's Guide. With one AGP, five PCI and four RIMM slots, the P4T has leading expandability. ATA/100 support ensures topnotch drive access speed and ASUS' legendary reliability, quality and stability help ensure years of trouble free operation.

We have been impressed by the ASUS P4T's performance and stability in our test lab. Normal office computing is likely equal to or less intensive than our test lab work, so we expect the P4T should hold up exceedingly well in business applications.

Current Cost: $127

ASUS has a reputation for high-quality motherboards and rightfully so. Their main KT133a board, the A7V133, carries on that tradition. ASUS has chosen to make stability a moral imperative, which is an extremely important feature for business systems.

Five PCI, one AMR and one AGP slot give the A7V plenty of expandability. Onboard UDMA ATA/66 is supplemented by an included Promise ATA100 PCI controller, so excellent disk speed is ensured. And three DIMM slots supporting PC133 memory give high-speed memory access and plenty of room for expansion. There are other brands, some of them cheaper, but we wholeheartedly recommend the ASUS A7V.

At the moment, DDR motherboards are starting to hit the market but until we have some very available and stable DDR solutions we're going to hold off on recommending them. We currently have a few untested DDR solutions in our lab, and once those have been reviewed, our AMD motherboard recommendation may change. For now, we recommend you stick with a pure KT133A/686B chipset for any Athlon system you build. Initially, us Sharks had difficulty with the 686b south bridge, but the VIA 4-in-1 service pack version 4.26 seems to have dealt with any software based issues we experienced.