But I'm getting ahead of myself...

It all started with Intel's D955XBK motherboard. Yup, that's it down there on the right. You probably can't tell, but it's a thing of beauty. There's a product brief (in PDF format) for it on Intel's website but the skinny on the board is simple...

Form Factor: 

• ATX (12.00 inches by 9.60 inches

Processor:

• Support for Intel® Pentium® Processor Extreme Edition (in an LGA775 socket with a 800 MHz system bus)

• Support for Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor Extreme Edition supporting Hyper-Threading Technology† (in an LGA775 socket with an 800 MHz system bus)

• Support for Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology† (in an LGA775 socket with a 800/1066 MHz system bus)

Memory:

• Four 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM DIMM sockets

• Support for 667 and 533 MHz DDR2 DIMMs

• Support for up to 8 GB of system memory

• Support ECC and non-ECC memory

Chipset:

• Intel® 955X Chipset

I/O Control:

• LPC Bus I/O controller

Audio:

• Intel® High Definition Audio subsystem

Video:

• One PCI Express* x16 bus add-in card connector supporting PCI Express* x16 graphics cards

LAN Support:

• Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem using the Intel® 82573E/82573V/82574V Gigabit Ethernet Controller

Peripheral Interfaces:

• Eight USB 2.0 ports

• One serial port

• One parallel port

• Four Serial ATA interfaces with RAID support

• One parallel ATA IDE interface with UDMA 33, ATA-66/100 support

• One diskette drive interface

• PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports

Expansion Capabilities:

• Three PCI Conventional* bus add-in card connectors (SMBus routed to PCI Conventional bus connector 2)

• One PCI Express* x16 bus add-in card connector

• One Secondary PCI Express* x16/x4 bus add-in card connector

• One PCI Express* x1 bus add-in card connectors

Say what you will about Intel (and we've probably said almost everything that can be said over time here), but it done good here. There are some oddities: Overclocking is a bit cryptic, sharing none of the ease of accomplishment that I have with my ASUS motherboards. I haven't quite figured it all out yet but I'm working on it (isn't that a line from a commercial?) as I find the time. The problem is that the board doesn't have an auto-recovery algorithm built into its BIOS so I'm back to, "turn off all power, remove jumper, re-apply power, boot into maintenance mode, reset BIOS, turn off all power, replace jumper, re-apply power," and there you are with a clean start. Oi! (One bright spot: You can save whatever mods you've done to the board as a custom config in ROM and then reload it once you've cleared everything. It takes a little of the edge off, but not much.)