I made a post before about possible doa or fried motherboard, and tried and tried to fix the issue myself and it all failed... so I proceeded with an RMA, after shipping the board back the place I bought it from they told me through email:

"We recently received your RMA and are now beginning to process the return. Unfortunately the product you sent us is presently out-of-stock or was recently discontinued from our inventory.

We will send you a follow-up email in 1-2 business days to offer you a comparable replacement item or a refund for the current market value. Refunds do not apply to Items with lifetime warranty and refunds will never exceed original purchase amount)"

It was discontinued.. and I had paid 159 usd for it at the time, then later on I seen the price went up to 199 usd, and now they've discontinued it, and I looked on several other sites and the motherboard is around 200 usd or so there as well.

As they said "refunds will never exceed original purchase amount" so I'd have to choose something similar "EVGA 122-CK-NF67-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i LT SLI ATX Intel Motherboard" $159 usd on their site and it's the same as I paid for the origional mother board I bought, or "ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard" $114 usd on their site.. It seems this one doesn't have the pci express expansion slot, and this one also only has 4 usb ports, no big deal I guess. Or alternatively I could spend another 40 usd and get the same motherboard from another site, which I've had issues with as well as alot of other people according to reviews I read on it.

Alot of people have told me to go with ASUS for quality but I just want the best motherboard out of the two, here are the specs:

EVGA - CPU Type: Quad-core / Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo / Pentium
ASUS - Intel Socket 775 Core™2 Quad/Pentium® Extreme/Pentium® D/Pentium® 4/Celeron Processors

EVGA -FSB 1333/1066MHz
ASUS - FSB 1333/1066/800/533/ MHz

EVGA - DDR2 800, up to 8GB
ASUS - DDR2 800/667/533, up to 6GB

EVGA - 2 x PCIE x16, 2 xPCI Express x1, 2 x PCI Slots
ASUS - 2 x PCIe x16 , Single VGA mode: x16 (Default), SLI mode: x8, x8, 1 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI 2.2

EVGA - PATA 1 x ATA100, 6 x SATA 3Gb/s, NV RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD
ASUS - 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66/33
4 xSATA, RAID 0,1,0+1,5,JBOD, 1 x External Serial ATA

EVGA - 10/100/1000Mbps
ASUS - Gigabit LAN featuring AI Net2 Marvell 88E1116 PHY

EVGA - Audio Channels 8 Channels
ASUS - Realtek ALC883 6 -Channel CODEC

EVGA - Rear Panel Ports: PS/2 x 2, 4 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE 1394a, S/PDIF Out, Audio 6 Ports
ASUS - 1 x Parallel, 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse
1 x External SATA, 1 x S/PDIF Out, 1 x IEEE 1394a, 1 x LAN(RJ45) port, 4 x USB 2.0/1.1, 6 -Channel Audio I/O

EVGA - Package Contents: Driver Disk, Rear I/O Panel Shield, IDE/PATA Cable, FDD Cable, SATA Cable
4-pin to SATA Power Cable, SLI Bridge
ASUS - User's manual,SLI bridge, USB2.0 module
1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cables, 1 x Floppy disk drive cables, 2 x SATA cables, SATA power cables,I/O Shield,2 in 1 Q-connector,I/O Shield


So should I get the EVGA board or the ASUS one?

To me... if you're going to get a new board-- you need PCI express...
VGA is old at this point-- they won't be available forever.
I would either get the EVGA-- or better-- take the refund-- add in a few more $... and go shopping around.
you are in the US-- go to Newegg
They have user ratings/comments... and excellent service.

Yeah that's where I got the origional mobo from, that's where I get all of my parts from actually. Both of these boards support pci-e though.

I would go with the EVGA, just for the fact it has the 680i chipset. Though personally i like the Intel P35/ X38 series chipsets.

I wanted to go with EVGA too, just needed a 15th opinion .

no problem. marked as resolved