Choosing A Motherboard

My personal preference is Asus, Gigabyte and Intel. I've owned multiple boards from all of them and have had good track records. The only one I ever had a problem with was a gigabyte, and after about 7 years, one of the IDE controllers onboard simply crapped out. I put in an IDE card and it went a few more years before I retired the box.

With any product, I look at the reviews. But I don't put much faith in the reviews that give it 1 star and say "Absolutely garbage, etc". Especially with something like hard drives. It seems some people have tons of bad hard drive after hard drive after hard drive. But yet, I simply cannot remember the last physical hard drive that actually failed on me. And I've gone through lots of hard drives over the years at work as well as at home. They are often replaced as they became too small, or too slow.

I've used Biostar mobos without problems. Friends of mine are currently using MSI boards on new Sandy Bridge setups without any issue. I've had other friends who used DFI boards. While I have heard of ASRock, I don't know anybody personally who has used one.

Earlier you asked about Asrock boards. I have a P67 Asrock extreme4 MB. All I can say is that is has performed anything I have tried to do and have had no issues with it. The board is solid. The best I can say about this board is that I have messed up bios trying to OC and blue screened trying to boot windows, but I have never been able to do anything that will make it not post. This is the only Asrock board I have any experience with. I have experience with MSI and cannot recommend them. Others seem to like it but I'll never have have another MSI board.

I've seen that but like you have never given it much thought. I have an Intel board and you are looking at an AMD board. As you know, they are both completely different animals. It just strikes me that I've always been told that all chipsets come with a set number of lanes of traffic they can support and it's true that most have to give some items less lanes to give other items more. So, if that is true it seems like some items are addons, similar with what all the P67 boards do by adding on the Marvell ports. So, what they may be doing is giving all the chipset lanes to pcie and sata ports and having an addon USB 3.0. However, I guess it makes no difference how they do it as long as the performance is there.

It actually has 2 X16, 1X16@X4, and 2 X1. If you look at Newegg You will be able to get more details than Amazon gives.

I would trust the manufacturer's website rather than the likes of eBay, Amazon, Scan, Newegg, etc.

ASRock > Products > 890FX Deluxe4

Looks like a solid choice Seeker. I like the 8 USB ports on the rear and the 3 USB headers on the board, one of which is USB3.0 for a case with those ports. A total of 14 USB ports possible!