For many years I've used Gigabyte motherboards, until a five week old 7ZX board failed completely. It appeared to be a failure of the BIOS chip, which had also occurred on a friends Gigabyte 5AX a couple of months before. Eventually I did get a replacement.
In order to use my new IBM ATA100 hard drive at maximum performance (without having to use a PCI controller card), and my AMD 900Mhz Thunderbird processor, I brought an ASUS A7V motherboard.
This turned out to be the best decision I've ever made! Some of the more outstanding features include 2xIDE disk controllers + 2xATA100 disk controllers, support for seven USB ports (five supplied!) and comprehensive voltage and temperature monitoring which will aid the overclocker (or like me, assurance that everything is ok). 3 DIMM memory slots take either PC100 or PC133 memory. An excellent board, but not cheap. However, if you want quality and performance then this ASUS motherboard is the business.
In order to use the latest, fastest DDR333 memory and have the option to use USB2 with a new flatbed scanner, I've updated my motherboard yet again (Mar 2002). This time I have stayed this Asus and purchased an A7V333 motherboard (with integral Raid controller, sound and Firewire), at a recent Tolworth computer fair, for £129. Fitting an AMD Athlon 1900+ processor (which incidentally has a clock speed of 1600MHz) cost another £130.