Well I have made my purchase, and the winner is...

Asus A7N8X Deluxe ver2.00 for $119.

I want to thank all of you for your input. I greatly appreciate all the
insight I took from your responses.


"Shap" wrote in message
news
OK, I have been researching this for almost two months now, and I'm
finally
approaching the day of deliverance. I have a comp show to goto next
Saturday, where I will be making a large # of purchases toward building a
new system. I have a 1700+ I got from a friend and I also ordered the Aero
7+. Now I need to decide on a board. I have somewhat narrowed my choices
to
the Asus a7n8x deluxe ver 2.0 or the Abit nf7-s ver 2.0. I do not want
onboard video, as I want the ability to easily change video options as I
develop needs. So which do I go with? I am not really ready to overclock
yet, but would like to later on with out changing hardware. I will be
running 2 PATA Maxtor 80gig drives in raid 0, I have a CDRW, DVD-Rom, and
will be adding a DVDRW before the end of the year. I also have a large
number of USB devices - keyboard, mouse, printer, Scanner, IrDA dongle so
I
need a board that USB is a near slam dunk on. Firewire isn't a must, but
it
would be nice to expand to later on.

Please help.