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What is the best motherboard to use with an Intel 
Submit Complaint..Any LGA 775 motherboard will work with a Core 2 Quad CPU (example, a Q9550 CPU). Just understand that any quad that stars with Q8XXX is 65 nanometer and Q9XXX is 45 nanometer.
You want to stick with the Q9XXX processor class because it operates cooler. Any LGA 775 board is designed for this class of processors, whether it is ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, BIOSTAR, etc.).
You can pick up a fairly good motherboard for $50 that will do basic things for you, but in order to get the more fancy and better quality boards, you need to look at boards that are running between $120 and $160. Anything more expensive than this is a "Tweaker" or "Overclocker" board. You can spend another $100+ on an overclocker model.
What you want to do is say, pick out three LGA 775 boards from each of ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI (the top three) and then study the specifications for each board. You can do this by just logging onto ASUS, GIGABYTE or MSI sites. You may have to register as a free member to get to some of the information. But gettin the specs is what is important. Then you go down the list, feature by feature, and compare. Reduce it down to one board per manufacturer, and then compare the final 3 boards from each manufacturer to each other and pick one. At that point, you go out on the net and go to places like Tom's Hardware and Anantech and you read their articles on the motherboard you have picked to see if there have been problems. Also, you can check each board out and find out how many BIOS updates there have been. The more BIOS updates there are for a board, the more problems there have been! As a general rule of thumb, stay away from any motherboard that has been out for a little while yet has a large number of BIOS updates...typically, the manufacturer will tell you what the BIOS updates are for, and time and again, what I have seen, its been to troubleshoot a particular problem, like recognizing certain kinds of memory, or adjusting the BIOS for flaws in reading other hardware - USB ports, etc. You can just bet that any board your buy out there might well have a BIOS problem that is not fixed or the problem itself is not fixed if there are a lot of BIOS updates. The only time I think a lot of BIOS updates are justified, is if a new class of CPU has been released and the manufacturer's are working out bugs for a new CPU class - this is a fair reason to submit a large number of BIOS channges - but this is NOT the case with Q processors and LGA 775 boards - any LGA 775 board out there now that has a large number of BIOS changes (I would say, 4 -5 BIOS updates within a year of its release) should be AVOIDED.
I am currently running a Q9550 CPU on an ASUS PQ5C motherboard. I also have another computer running a Q9400 CPU on an ASUS PQ5 motherboard (note, they are not the same mobo's). Both are stable and I like them both for their features. You might want to investigate these two boards as possibilities.
