@QuantumShark Dude, most PC gamers don't spend $1500 per year on their system. Actually, if you tally up all the costs of your 360/PS3 and your laptop/desktop home computer, along with your TV and sound system, it is actually more expensive than an all-in-one PC. I haven't upgrade my PC (with the exception of my video card and hard drive) in nearly 5 years. It is still going strong!

magusat999 You're forgetting that all of us buy computers every 2 or 3 years for non-gaming applications. Having a video card is basically buying a console for the price of $150-$250. A matter of fact, the Radeon X1xxx series and Geforce 7xxx series can still out perform the 360 and PS3, as long as the developers made the games correctly (look at prey, elder scroll 4, quake 4, call of duty 4, prince of persia etc etc). The only games that I can think of that requires a GTX 280 or 4870X2 to run at 2560x2048 max detail, 8x AA and 16x Anisotropic are Crysis and Crysis Warhead.

A real test for this motherboard is playing Supreme Commander since that game is heavy HEAVY CPU dependency in large AI games.

fastpunk: I must agree with you 100%. Ever since AMD bought ATI, ATI went downhill in performance-price ratio. ATI was destroying nVIDIA in all angles but now they can't keep up. If Intel buys nVIDIA, it will be the same fate for nVIDIA.

Ummm, you guys are fighting over a small increase in performance. Both HD3870 and 8800GT perform well. It just that nVIDIA has the slight upper hand. I don't see this as an a$$whopping. If, for example, Crysis performance of nVIDIA is 45FPS and ATI 25FPS, that's a big difference but it's just only 5FPS. There are more factors than just the hardware itself: drivers, OS, RAM, CPU usage etc. So all the fanboys (I hate that term) please, just give it a rest. I personally am going to buy the HD3870 because of the high performance/price ratio. I already have a X1600 and it's pretty good on Crysis with the Shaders on Medium (Shaders are a big performance drain in this game). BTW, isn't the HD38xx and the HD2xxx have the PPU processing power such that it takes a load off of the CPU? Please correct me on this. If that's the case, the extra drain of performance can be coming from that area. Think about it.

Space Rangers 2. That game is awesome and the requirements are super low.