$159 MSI p55-gd65 mobo $25 off at newegg w/ discount & coupon code

Meant to post this here at Tom's sooner, but forgot gaaaah. Hopefully anyone interested still has time to take advatage, offer expires today.

coupon link

Reviews of this motherboard:

Tech Report liked it quite a bit versus the $200+ Asus/Gigabyte. offerings.

Anandtech liked it w/ the caveat that it needs more BIOS tuning. Article was from two weeks ago and there hasn't been a BIOS update since that time.

pcPer gave it an Editor's Choice award.

Its bigger brother the GD80 has been getting rave reviews from all over, but had a buncha features I didn't need nor want to pay for so I've been watching for deals lately on this model. After seeing this one, I pulled the trigger on it and some RAM for my g/f's build.

Not interested? Here are two comparable boards from Asus and Gigabyte for ~$169 each, no coupon of course. All 3 of these boards have their own caveats. Gigabyte woulda been my first choice due to their better use of the audio codec, but the Gigabyte layout is flawed if you care about running SLI along w/ multiple other PCIe cards. Asus' VIA codec supposedly sucks but that board has a layout that is very good and perhaps the best of the lot depending on your needs. MSI's Realtek audio codec is almost as good as Gigabyte's, but isn't the full implementation. If none of this audio nonsense or issues w/ expansion slots matter to you, all 3 are excellent choices for people who want a board that supports SLI/Xfire. There are less expensive models from all 3 companies if you're not likely to ever run dual video cards (or don't need any of the other bells and whistles).