Go with what I bought.  That's one of the reasons I bought it as it supports AM2+ and AM3.

I haven't built an AMD rig in years, but this looks to be a good deal and is well rated at new egg.  I'd give it a go if you want to go AMD. 

I am kinda burnt on AMD now. Last desktop I built, I spent over $400 just on the cpu and near $200 on the mobo. A few months later the cpu was 1/3 the price and the socket(939) had been discontinued. But yeah, AM3 should provide some future-proofing.

thanxx scott .... will give a look at this one ...

Yup, can't go wrong with a Gigabyte mobo... which is why I'm going with one of the two I linked to above.  For some reason I can't find a local retailer/outlet that has the GA-MA790GP-UD4P you linked to, not that it makes a lot of difference, except for perhaps in price... these have the same 790x chip and are similar in performance, etc. 

The important thing for me is that they have 2 extra SATA ports to my current board, and that means I can then run ALL SATA drives and ROMS.  At present I'm having to run 1 IDE ROM and 1 IDE HDD as I do not have the SATA ports... and I'll just swap out those SATA components from my spare rig (and vice versa) so it costs me no more than the mobo.

Yeah, I had a similar experience when I first went with AMD.  I was advised that it would be the mainstay socket for quite some time so bought a 939 socket, an AMD Athlon x2 3800+, and lived to regret it.  Just 6 months later the ASUS mobo went guts up and I couldn't get another 939 socket board anywhere... and I got no warranty/replacement joy from ASUS as they had no more in stock Instead they offered me an AM2 board.  Wasn't much use to me at the time, though, I had a 939 socket CPU and didn't have the available finances to replace it as well as the RAM to DDR2.  Bastards!!!

I had to go back to my old P4 on a Gigabyte board for a while, which is now nearing 7 years old and still running well.  Guess that's why I stick with Gigabyte, which has always been reliable... had two bad experience with ASUS and I'm not going to get burned a 3rd time.  My current Gigabyte board is still good so I'll build another rig around it using my Athlon x2 6400 and other left over parts from prior upgrades.

BTW, for anyone still with a 939 socket CPU but no mobo, ASRock now make one... see here

It's never good economy to go for the latest and greatest....but perhaps a few levels down and you don't see 'that much' of a performance hit.... assuming what you're upgrading from is ancient enough....

My current machine is a P4P800E with a P4/3.0.

I'm now a few bob poorer... but have a bunch of bits to put together.... starting with a P6Tse and an i7 920.

The whole box-and-dice came out at 2755.02 AUD [which is probably around 2200 USD]...

I've used several Gigabyte boards in build for myself, family and friend in the last 2 yrs.

I love everyone. I say great deal on a good quality board.

I really like Gigabytes Dual BIOS and express recovery.

if your not familiar with GB boards the dual BIOS allows you to save a BIOS copy to either a floppy or to a backup in the CMOS. make for easy backup when flashing or just plain safety.

the built in express recovery is nice too. all you have to do is leave some RAW unpartitioned space on the OS drive. If I remember right you have to boot from GB driver disk the first time, after that is like F2 or something to access, can create/restore system backups whenever you want. downfall is figuring how much raw space to leave, 20G, 50G???? how much do you want to be able to back up???? It will NOT create a backup if the raw space is not larger than the "used" space on the OS drive.

If you're really not going for the latest and greatest, you can build yourself a very stable gaming rig with 4 gigs of ram and a core duo chip, coupled with an 8800 or 9600 Nvidia graphics card for well under a grand.