First thing I want to say is I've missed you guys. Job I was working at in the beginning of the year, somebody referred me to this site and I used to have this board up on my workstation all day long while troubleshooting PCs and Servers (I got severely addicted).

Second, I'm sorry for posting this question here, but this was always my preferred thread and Tech Opinion Speakout is all but a ghost town. Figured I'd get better info here as well.

Third, the question....I'm planning to upgrade my primary home system and I think I have narrowed my choices down. I'm not quite ready to make my primary system AMD (ready to catch flak) but am looking at upgrading it from a P3-800 to a P4-1.7 (478). After a bunch of research surfing lately, I'm leaning towards the P4X266 chipset from VIA for the use of DDR RAM as I have never been crazy about RDRAM and the more I read, the more I'm turned away from it. I guess what I basically want to know are your opinions and recommendations regarding Mobos with the P4X266. It doesnt seem like any of the big names have boards out yet and I didnt really see anything regarding them coming out with anything soon. Intel is trying to play catch up and wont have DDR enabled boards untill early 2002. Right now best I've seen reviewed is a Mobo by Shuttle, model AV40/R. (after viewing the other boards on their site, model AV45GT/R also caught my eye as AV40/R had something about CMTL Certified Memory Only)

The last 2 boards I've bought have been Abit and for the most part I've been okay with them (have had very minor problems but most part seemed good boards). I like the fact that the AV40/R Award BIOS is pretty much the same as in the Abit boards I've gotten used to. The reviews I've seen about the Shuttle board have been good with the only downside being instability after OCing initially, but no tweaking was done with settings to see if that could be fixed, and I dont care about OCing really anyways.

Have any of you had any experiences with either board, or know of Shuttle to be "shoddy" in general? Do they keep up to date with BIOS upgrading? Do you have other, better recommendations for a Mobo? Any known issues or compatibility problems? Or do you know of any bigger name manufacturers with a P4X266 board that would be a better choice?

TIA
-Danyll (Not the greatest tech in the world but not completely inept)
>>Damn this post got kinda long...I been trying to stop that<<


P.S.-I was hoping to use PC2100 DDR RAM (preferrably Crucial) and would be using SBLive 5.1Gamer and ElsaGladiac Ultra GF2 that I have in my AOpen tower with 300W PSU. All my drives are a little out of date being ATA66 and ATA33 but I can worry about those later and know about the same channel IDE shtuff.