Building a new DAW Gigabyte or ASUS

I bought the exact same Asus MoBo for my new DAW and have absolutely NO regrets.
BTW, the built-in firewire on the MoBo doesn't have a TI chip so I disabled it in BIOS and am using a firewire card that does have a TI chip, if that matters to you.

Good stuff, At this point I am not planing on a firewire system. I'm pretty happy with the Tascam.
I am doing a lot of live band recording so it's mostly Audio tracks and then might be 2 at the most MIDI for traditional Keyboard stuff. I'm hanging on by a thread right now with my old Acer laptop. I don't dare add any efxs until all is finished being recorded. Other than my netbook I bought last year I haven't bought a new computer for 5 years so way overdue. My Netbook is Asus and I have found the company makes solid stuff. That's why the hard choice because the Gigabyte has USB 3.0 and the ASUS does not, Might be by the fall things will change anyhow.

I used a lot of ASUS mobos, but I stopped using ASUS about 5 years ago, and started using Gigabyte.
Why? Many ASUS boards had severe design mistakes in the power regulation. Modern chipsets and components draw significant current and ASUS continued to use linear regulation, where the mos-fets went to about 110ºC, resulting in main chips working at 90ºC and capacitor near the regulators even above 100ºC, and that with 25ºC case temperature. Some died, and those that didn't was because i modified them with switching regulators. Same problem with my current asus portable, and even more problematic there due to energy inneficiency and damage to batteries by heat. I will not buy ASUS mobos or portables again, i have received for repair an incredible amount of ASUS boards covering a broad range of recent models, most unreparable and in all cases broken by overheating.  It is a shame that who was in the past probably the best manufacturer has been selling all that crap for several years.
Gigabyte is making really good quality boards, i have used many of them without any problems. And I would buy many of the other brands too before ASUS.

Just curious as to why your are not going with 1366 chipset and a core 7 Intel ?

The plot thickens!

I'm going with a i5 because I was told an i7 will put the price up by $400 overall, and there would be very little benefit for what I need it to do. But thats why I'm posting, I respect the opinions of most of the people here when it comes to this stuff. Local computer techs are not musicians, and gamers are from another planet too. 

OK but it looks like from my source it's more than $100.

http://ncix.com/products/...anufacture=Intel 

The only difference I see is the clock goes from 2.66Ghz to 2.8Ghz.
That seems marginal if not pointless for $100.

Lend me $100 and I'll go for it.....