If you are watching out for a motherboard with a formidable price, quality parts, and a support team you can count on look no further than the motherboards from Gigabyte. I have used Gigabyte motherboards in a variety machines and have was terribly successful with every one of them. They have an over 20 year track record of top quality, top of the line motherboards. Lately they have started to add better price to their products. These products have the same high quality and the top end motherboards.

Gigabyte motherboards work with both Intel and AMD processor chips. While these chips aren't interchangeable, there are analogous models that may mount either manufacturer's chips. They now make motherboards that support the Intel Socket 1366, 775, 479 / 437, 478 and M chipset configurations.

Core i7 processor launch paralleled with the X58-Express motherboard chipset in November of 2008.Ten months later and with the September of 2009 into, Intel has returned with the P55-Express chipset for mainstream users who pair it with the new LGA1156 socket. From the outside point of view little more than the processor socket and memory configuration has changed, replacing dual-channel for triple. PCI-Express now offers only single 16 x lanes instead of two, while the number of SATA and USB ports continues to give more expansion room than the average user might need. The consumer might not know what to expect while choosing between the two products, other than one is mainstream (P55) and the other is for extreme enthusiasts (X58). Benchmark Reviews tests includes the Lynnfield Core i7-870 and Core i5-750 processors, and they also had inspection of Intel's P55-Express motherboard chipset in other articles, but they have yet to have a good apples-for-apples look at P55 versus X58. Comparing the 2.8GHz Core i7-860 LGA1156 Lynnfield CPU against Intel's 2.67GHz Core i7-920 LGA1366 with P55-Express mainstream or X58-Express enthusiast motherboards.