Well, there was the FIC-PT2003 I had back in 95 or 96. I started with a Pentium 75 in that, then graduated to a 133 which I overclocked to 166 with some rearrangement of jumpers. I made sure to order it with the pipelined burst cache slot populated for best performance. ;P That one will always hold a place in my heart as the first PC that was really "mine". Tore up some serious Duke Nukem 3D with it and my S3 Trio 64 video card.
Then there was the Abit IT5H. Put a Pentium 200MMX in that puppy. The fact that I could overclock it jumperlessly was HUGE. I think this was the board I had when the original 50 megapixel 3DFX cards were the thing to have if you were a serious gamer. That was GLQuake's heyday.
After that I had a Pentium II 300 (which I upgraded to a 450 in very short order) in a Soyo motherboard (I think it was something like the 6YBA+). Man those Soyo boards were flaky. Wouldn't wish them on anybody. Saw at least 4 of them fail.
Then I got my first Asus motherboard. That was a CUSL3, running a P3 733.
That lasted until my first P4, which ran at 2 GHz on another Asus board...the designation of which escapes me at the moment.
But then I got a 3.2 GHz P4 and ran it on a P4P800.
Which hung on a good while, until I upgraded to a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual Core E2200 modestly overclocked to 2.64 GHz in an MSI 945 Neo5-F. The total cost of that upgrade was about $178. It wasn't the highest quality or highest performance setup out there but I definitely got my money's worth and then some. Not only that but the board was trim and a very fashionable red. It lasted a good two and a half YEARS, delivering satisfactory performance for a very long time. It's a real contender considering my satisfaction with it while I was using it.
Yesterday I got my newest setup. It's a Gigabyte P55-USB3 rev 2.0 with an i3-530. It's running at stock now, and is a modest processor for the times but the leap in performance is HUGE. I have a real expectation of getting this thing over 3.6 GHz without putting another dime into it and of course I'm really happy with it. For a hundred dollar motherboard it certainly has all the trimmings.
But still, I can't help but think back to how happy I was with so many previous motherboards at the time I was actually using them. The PT2003 (ironically named considering it was 1995 or 96) was an excellent performer for the time and the IT5H was the stuff of legend. The Soyo boards are right out, but the CUSL3 that followed was really nice. I played a LOT of UT2003 on that motherboard and visually it ran as well as it would today...just at a lower resolution of course. The motherboard for my P2 was a little forgettable, but the P4P800 lasted years and continued service thereafter when I gave it to my uncle. (He upgraded straight to a 12 GB triple channel i7-920 monster once it became available. The maniac.) And, of course, the MSI board was really nice up until my recent upgrade (even if I was distressed to find one of its capacitors bulging a little and threatening a leak after I took it out of the case.)
I mean in absolute terms this Gigabyte board owns up and down...but for the times? Damn tough call.
