Advice about a motherboard

[Danger]

I need some help deciding whether or not to get a particular motherboard, and if not then what board to get. I plan on building a dual PIII tualatin system, but am unsure about the stability of the board I've selected.

Right now I'm looking at getting the GBGA-6VTXD from Gigabyte. I've looked around a bit and it seems to be the best board around that offers what I wan't. But from what I've heard when your dealing with Gigabyte its either hit or miss. The seem to have some products that are rock solid, while others aren't such a good deal. I personally don't have any experience with this company, and so I wanted your oppinions. Any insight you could offer in this regard is appreciated. As I said, stability is my main concern.

The website for the board is <a href="http://networking.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Products_ServerBoard_Spec.asp?ProductID=27" target="_blank">http://networking.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Products_ServerBoard_Spec.asp?ProductID=27</a>

Just FYI, in case you need this info when giving your advice, I'm setting this computer up as a server for my home, and it will be running either win2k or XP.

I don't really need advice about sound card/video card/memory etc. as I'm already set there. And yes, I know that I could build a kick butt Athlon system for the same amount of money. but then, I'm already building one of those

Thanks in advance.

[confus-ed]

Any particular purpose for the choice of a dual board over the single chip variety?

If you want performance for games and the like then just go like you said with a kick arse Athlon.

If you want lots of tasks at once then ok multiple processors, as:-

Multiple CPUs=Increased Multiple thread performance.

But that's usually for servers, in which case get your money down for some f. fast SCSI stuff, this will give more performance lift as will more/faster memory than any amount of faster chips.

All pc's use Von NoyWhatisface Architecture, that is they have a single control point. In a single cpu system this control point is the cpu, in multiple cpu systems that point can either be the active processor or more correctly memory.

Either way you've got to get the stuff in and out, so your bottleneck is always the pci bus.
So it doesn't matter how much processing power you have for any and all tasks, you'll still be waiting for a disk commit to complete.....

So my opinion is spend your dosh on some top end scsi stuff, if you've still got some left then sure multiple processors......

[Danger]

Thanks for your reply. I agree that for gaming I could easily go another route that will give me better performance for less money, however this machine isn't primarily a gaming machine. I'm more interrested in multitasking and running several apps at once which is why I'm looking at going with a dual board. And with the bottleneck, there isn't much that I can do about the pci-bus speed. however I am planing on adding a PCI ATA-100 RAID controller to this machine in the future. I will probably go IDE, however. In any case if anyone has any experience with this board, I still need to know how stable it is.

Also, If it does turn out that this is a good board then I will be buiding an additional system with it for a friend who is interrested in doing CAD work. with that in mind, can anyone suggest a graphics card that can handle CAD design? I know that the Geforce and Radeon series are good for gaming, but I have heard that for CAD work they don't cut it. As always, your help is appreciated.