Any advice welcome. A year ago, I bought an Asus Sabertooth X58 to run an i7 950. What a disaster! In the last 8 months, the motherboard has given constant random failures which 'go away' after a BIOS update or a clearing of the CMOS or playing around with the settings in BIOS. Now the motherboard has completely failed and refused to start claiming a VGA card error even though it’s a false error. I've sent it back to Digitec but I don't hold much hope of them replacing it as my cat jumped on it and bent a few pins. (I know, should have covered it up and immediately protected it)

So anyway, I did lots of research and apart from finding out that the Sabertooth X58 is a pile of poop (many others report same failures and less than 1 year before the board fails. Very surprising to me as I have always purchased ASUS boards as I think they are pretty good) it seems people are really complaining about a lot of LGA1366 motherboards, regardless of manufacturer.

Can anyone recommend a good LGA1366 motherboard which they have used? I ask as these boards are very expensive so I want to buy one which is reliable/tried and tested. (By the way; why are these boards so bloody expensive??)

Any advice would be appreciated.

i always use gigabyte. they are very reliable.

Gigabyte are utterly reliable. I only use theirs or Intel boards. They have many board options , depending on your requirements.

Hopefully this link works for you...

http://www.digitec.ch/?wk=6IN6%2fD8f3oE

Thanks for that. Any model you can recommend? I noticed that some of the Swiss suppliers are only selling Gigabyte models of version 1.0 when the latest is V2. Just wondering if there was any problems with the V1.

Where do you buy yours? I'm looking at Digitec, Microspot and Stegg.

you can check their website or forums for details of board revisions to see if there's anything critical. can't recommend a specific one in your case as i don't have a 1366 chip.

The link works fine, thanks. I have used Gigabyte a couple of times before when there was no ASUS alternative available and never had any problems. To be honest, I have nearly always used ASUS and in the past I would stand by my opinion that they are one of the best PC component suppliers

I can't say that now and frankly my opinion is really changing.

Asus seems to be a well-regard brand. i've have a problems with the 2 boards i have:

- one was an opteron system and the PCI-E didn't like an intel gigabit lan controller. this might have been a hyper-transport bus problem so maybe not asus's fault

- the other doesn't output sound. seems to be a very common problem and i'm not sure what the root cause is. spdiff output seems to work, but none of the usual outputs work.

i won't be in a hurry to use asus again...