just a quick question, I'm planning my first build, however, I dont know how "compatible" ati cards are with nvidia chipsets. Ive heard a lot of ppl with intel chipsets and nvidia cards, and they work just fine, but i havent heard of anyone with a nvidia chipset/ati card combo. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

It'll work fine. Although ideally, you should have nvidia card running on intel chipset. Nvidia makes good card, bad motherboard.

It's fine. I have an NVidia nForce 4 SLI chipset and ATI 2900XT in my rig and it runs fine (great, actually). The only thing you lose is the ability to crossfire (on ATI) or SLI (on NVidia) later. I haven't seen any evidence of one rigging their system against the other.

Tom's Hardware did a test a while back of ATI and nVidia cards on ATI, nVidia and Intel chipsets and they showed chipset pairing doesn't really matter.

Unless you are planning to Crossfire your ATI display card on mainboard with Nvidia chipset, otherwise it is fine to use ATI display card on Nvidia chipset mainboard.

There are no problems with single cards at all. That would be so anti-competitive that you'd know about it if there as a problem.

thx 4 the feedback. wat about a card like 3870x2? Would it run?

It'll run fine. Dual gpu cards do not require sli or crossfire enabled boards.

Yep, a 3870x2 would work fine since the Crossfire is basically built into the card itself.

However, why are you looking at nVidia motherboards??? I would only ever recommend one if someone really wanted to SLI two nVidia graphics cards... If they were just going to run one card, be it nVidia or ATI, I'd say go with Intel for better stability, support, performance, etc (in most cases anyway). Maybe if you already had the nVidia chipset I could understand putting in an ATI card, but if you're building from scratch get an Intel board with your ATI card. Get an X38 if you want to leave the door open for adding a second ATI card for Crossfire some day, or get a solid P35 board (GA-EP35-DS3L for like ~$100) if you just plan on using one graphics card.

It would work fine, but like dagger said, Nvidia makes great GPUs but their current offering of MOBO chipset isn't all that impressive if not way over priced. If you are planing on an ATI GPU then I would go with an intel chipset. If you plan on going multi card then the x38 if not then the p35. gigabyte probably has the best boards right now.