I would
not personally buy an nVidia based board for three reasons:
-to take
full advantage of an nVidia GPU, you really want a MOBO w/an nVidia chipset - they're 'sub-optimized' for each other;
-I have had, over the years, a
huge number of strange problematic behaviors with nVidia drivers, culminating with a particular incident where I troubleshot a glitch in a forty-thousand line Excel macro, meant to feed processing plant error messages to a serial encoded rf paging unit, for
two whole weeks before discovering it was an nVidia video driver problem (how the H could
THAT interrupt DDE driven macro execution?); that led me to swear off, and use ATI
exclusively: have had few video-related problems since, and always have gotten respectable tech services from them, though I viewed their recent purchase with great trepidation;
-I am
particularly incensed by nVidia's handling of the ESA (Enthusiast System Architecture) debacle: much-lauded at its release as an
'open standard', it
requires an nVidia chipset MOBO to get your
fan controller (or any other d$#ned ESA device) to work properly! 'Open Standard'
should mean 'SDK available',
but nVidia guards this info
like a pack of rabid wolverines. I know the writer of SpeedFan has been after them for some time now to get access, as have I and any number of people: the Gods at nVidia have not seen clear to smile on us...
Ok - rant over; that said, my policy is to buy last year's darling of the gaming set, now that it's 'obsolete to them', and selling for half what it cost them last year. (Frankly, I think they're all nuts - who would pay six thousand dollars for a system optimized to squeak a few extra frames per second out of some brain-numbing game? - but - God bless 'em, they keep the wars between AMD & Intel, and ATI & nVidia, et al, revved up and
capitalized, and we profit from their cheap 'left-overs!) I'm running a pair of Sapphire 3850s which were well under a hundred a pop, and tame aero to the point that the machine seems telepathic... If I had to pick, I'd stick with ASUS, EVGA, or MSI, all of whom seem to do a good job of implementation; the GeForce 9600 boards seem to be a good value at that price-point - take a look at this one @NE:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130437
Good luck,
Bill