The question is as per title : I'm thinking of upgrading my PC and I
wondered what is the best liked multiple-chip dual or quad core
motherboard at the moment ? I am not a gamer or overclocker but I do
develop software and would like high performance.

Just to throw another dice amongst the pidgeons, I would prefer
something that can have quiet coolers fitted to the CPUs.

I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual core
was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005 doesn't
make use of both cores during a compile and while my Core 2 Duo is faster
than my Athlon 2400+, I am disappointed with the improvement - the second
core just sits around doing tiny windows tasks for most of the day!


For anyone interested, I should add that whilst single threaded tasks have
only speeded up slightly, gaming seems much better! However the actualy
improvement is difficult for me to judge because I have also upgraded my
graphics cards by about 4 generations!