Looks like a nice board and I've had really good luck with ASUS. If you can settle for a 550 this MSI board will save you quire abit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130050
My only 2 gripes about that board are the lack of a 2nd ide port and the location of the floppy connector. Unfortunately all but 2 of my 7 or 8 hard drives are Ultra-ATA IDE, not Serial-ATA. I currently have 2 sata-300 and 2 uata-100 drives as well as 1 ide dual layer burner. I'd be short of a single connection, so I suppose I currently require 2 ide ports. So close too. Damn. I'm going to do more research. Hopefully I'll find other choices to choose from, though I am a faithful Asus customer. I'd consider MSI, Abit or Gigabyte as well. Thanks for the info.
-- MaSoP
Doing a quick check on newegg it looks like your choices are limited if you need 2 ATA connectors. None of these look that good. I believe you can get a PCI card that will allow you to connect more ATA drives
This is true. The promise cards are fairly easy to find. As long as they give good performance w/o any problems, errors, etc. I only need 1 pci slot for my sb audigy. I can always remove the modem I have (emergency backup for email) and just not worry about that.
-- MaSoP