I have never done any penny pinching. I picked the P5Q Pro up as on paper its an awsome board, just doesn't quite carry through in practicality unfortunately. Of course, a majority of the issues the P5Q Pro has could be down to the P45 not particularly being geared for 65nm CPUs, just 45nm. I'll be picking a EEPROM programmer up soon anyway, real handy bit of kit to be able to just whack it in a USB port and program a ROM chip with any BIOS you need.