Price: $135 and up
Website: http://www.asus.com
Get current price here.

As a hardware reviewer, one of the most common questions we receive is, "What hardware do you use in your test systems?" After all, motherboards come and motherboards go but it takes a special piece of hardware to be considered good enough for use in a reference benchmarking platform. We take several factors into account when choosing such a board: stability, performance, compatibility, price and support. For the most part, ASUS has had an excellent reputation for incorporating these key elements into well-engineered products.

We are jumping ahead of ourselves, though. In the past couple of weeks we have looked at a couple of competing products from Gigabyte and FIC; both of which are very stable boards. We think most people would consider these solutions mid-range though, because they lack features present on some of the more expensive motherboards. For our first dabble with a heavy-hitting KT133 flagship, we thought we would take our benchmarking platform ASUS A7V for a spin. Hold on folks, this board does not like to play nice.