Poll: Which x58 motherboard?

[Bolas]

I'm building a new system from scratch. I've ordered the monitors, three refurbished NEC Multi-Synch LCD3090WQXi-BK. Hopefully one or more of them will show up in the next month or two. I plan to use them in portrait mode to create one big 12 mega-pixel screen.

http://www.necdisplay.com/Products/P...f-8d32b04f4fea

Now I need to plan out and order the parts to power these three 30" monitors.

I don't really have any parts from old builds to use, because this is my first time to build my own computer for my personal use. I'm not going to re-use the 315W power supply, the ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB, the four 250MB sticks of memory, or the clunky case or the from my ten year old Alienware desktop system. Nor do I have any parts to use from my refurbished HP Pavilion dv9260nr laptop from just over two years ago. So other than my Razer Copperhead mouse, the build will be a brand new one.

I plan to water-cool my system. This will be my first time to water cool a computer, although I do have friends that have done water cooling.

I've been saving my money for several years to make my "dream" system, so I have a reasonably large budget ($7k+), just under half of which has already been blown on the monitors ($3.1k). I can add to the budget some every month, so I don't have to get everything immediately. In other words, if I need more storage or a sound card or something, I can buy it this summer, I don't have to plan for absolutely every optional thing with this budget in one go.

I'm now at the point where I need to pick a motherboard and case, and I would like to use the valuable insight of the members of this forum to do so.

I primarily use my computer for 2D real time strategy games, like Warcraft III and Starcraft and Civilization IV. I will be buying Starcraft II and Civilization V when they come out this year. I used to play Everquest for eight years but have been off of it for about two years now. I wouldn't mind tooling around with that a bit more once the new setup is done. I also rarely play Team Fortress 2 from Orange Box, only about once a month.

With the new computer, I plan to buy Batman: Arkham Asylum and Bioshock and try those out because I've heard really good things about those games. That, and I've been a Batman fan since I was four. Go go Adam West, LOL. So in other words, I'm not any good at Doom or Quake or Unreal or Tribes or Half-Life or anything and I don't generally play first person shooter games. Having insane frame rates on Crysis: Warhead or Left for Dead 2 isn't all that important to me because I don't own the games and probably won't play them more than an hour a month even if I do buy them. Playable frame-rates would be fine.

I do have some interest in folding and such, so if the system I build has a lot of cores, memory, etc, I could find a way to put it to use.

But mostly what I want is a system that is insanely fast in day to day use. So a good SSD drive or two and a very fast over-clocked processor. I don't really need to over-clock my graphics cards because, as I mentioned, I don't currently play that kind of game all that much.

I plan to try to use the same case for the next dozen years and just upgrade the hardware as necessary. So the case selection becomes important. Also, if I don't have to upgrade the motherboard for a while, that would be good, too. So I'm thinking that a motherboard with USB3 and SATA 6GB/s would make more sense than one without those features, because I think over the next five years, there will be numerous USB3 devices that I'll want, so I don't want to have to swap out my motherboard to use them.

Also, I like the extra memory lanes and PCIe lanes for the x58 setup, so I do not plan to use a P55 or similar motherboard.

It's likely that I'll buy one or more six-core 32nm Gulftown processors to power my new system. These cpu's are due to be released in just over a week, if I remember correctly.

So I've basically narrowed it down to the four motherboards that have USB3 and SATA 6GB/s that are either out now or will be out soon and which are reasonably easy to water-cool and over-clock.

I'd appreciate it if you would vote for the one that you would recommend for me.