Don't go skimpy on the mobo..

I wanted to share my experiences with my previous motherboard in comparison with my new one. My old one was an Elitegroup IC780M-A. I got it because I was transitioning from an AM2 CPU to an AM3, but didn't want to give up the DDR2 memory. I chose the IC780M-A because it seemed very streamlined and didn't have unneccesary features that I wouldn't need. It also theoretically supported 32gb RAM and it was cheap; around 40 bucks. Since I figured mobos wouldn't effect performance much I swiped it.

It's been an OK mobo, but I didn't realize how bad it was until it died on me (after about 6 months BTW) and I got an Asus M5A97 for 100 bucks. You get what you pay for, so I won't praise the fact that I can now use a USB mouse and perform automatic overclocking, easy tweaks within a beautiful GUI- all within the BIOS. What I will praise is the overall increase in stability. It's not a huge performance boost, but these tiny things really made the purchase worth it:

Need for Speed Shift had a wierd issue where it would run perfectly within the menu.. selecting cars.. selecting a track.. but then turn into a slideshow as soon as I enter the race. Now it's silky smooth all the way.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 worked fine before, but now it seems smoother and more responsive than before.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier wouldn't accept certain input from the KB/M unless I did some wierd trick. Now it works fine.

Shattered Horizon is moderately playable at 1080p now..

My media card reader would sometimes crash the OS. Now it works fine and it's even recognized in the BIOS.

Throughout both mobos, I used the same parts:

Phenom II 955 quad 3.2ghz OC'd to 3.7ghz, nVidia Geforce 9800GT, Xonar Essence STX. The only exception is that I had 8GB DDR2, now I have 16GB DDR3, though I highly doubt that affected performance much.

Perhaps this mobo takes better advantage of the bandwidth, idk, but "I'm lovin' it!" [singing catchy McDonald's melody (that darn advertising really works..)]

Could some of those "improvements" have to do with the fact that you are running a fresh install right now? Seems hard to believe a mobo made such a difference. But ya I always buy good brand motherboards and will agree that one should never skimp it.

I can understand how it seems that way, but those problems were persistent even when I did fresh installs on the last mobo.

I have a $43 MSI G41M-P26 LGA775 motherboard from newegg. It's paired with a 2.6ghz Celeron E3400 and 5770. Runs like a champ, troublefree that is.

my m4A785-m cost me 60 bucks it has survived 2 cpu's 3 gpu's and 2 revisions of windows. i think its okay

ECS is typically pretty bad, I had a few of them and they gave me issues ranging from slight stability problems to constant crashes.

I think it might have something to do with the quality of the firmware.

Ever since I went to Abit and then Asus never had any issues.

Alot of mobo's even cheaper ones are decent, where you don't want to skimp on mobo's is when you plan on doing some hard OC'ing. Other than this, my cheaper PC builds I have around the house all run like champs.

As long as you get a decent brand it should be ok.

My M4N78 is quite cheap but since it's asus it's been fine. Overclocking settings aren't good though.