Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5
There are many high quality motherboards on the market, but only a handfull offer the key features we feel are most important:
1. Excellent overclocking support - specifically, for the 45nm Intel Core 2 CPUs that the Reactor uses.
2. Support for full speed CrossfireX. CrossfireX is when you run two ATI Radeon graphics cards to drive one monitor for increased performance. Even if you only buy a PC with one video card, we want you to have the option of adding a second one later - it gives you an excellent upgrade option you otherwise wouldn't have!
3. Support for DDR2-1066 memory. There is a considerably steep point of diminishing returns above this level of memory. You can spend three times as much money on DDR3 memory with zero increase in game performance (trust us, we've benchmarked it). Even when faster memory does speed games up, the difference is so slight that it isn't worth the extra hundreds of dollars spent.
