I packaged up my Abit AV8 to get it ready to return to NewEgg. I'm going to try and get a refund rather than exchange it as my patience is wearing thin. I decided to buy a motherboard locally so I could get some support. I went with the Asus A8V deluxe from ComputerStop. They will let you return for full refund within 7 days. That sounded pretty good. I dropped it in, only hooking up the bare minimum, and it posted no problems. I hurried up and grabbed the latest bios off the web. Asus has a cool feature were the bios will update itself from disk, you don’t even need to make it bootable. This board is more expensive than the Abit, but it has a few more features. I has support for IDE raid as well as SATA raid. In fact it has 4 IDE channels and 4 SATA. The only feature I’m missing that I kinda wanted was Spdif in.
I’ve built a lot of computers over the years (I used to run a computer business on the side), and I had standardized on Asus with good results. I don’t remember why I switched away from them. If this works out well I might send more business their way.
If your Asus board supports QFAN and you haven't enabled it in the bios you should give it a whirl. QFAN will spin the cpu fan down a bit until the temperature rises about a threashold just like your box at work.
Yeah it also supports AMD's cool and quiet that will slow down the fan AND the processor dynamically. I think it also drops the voltage. This is all good and nice, but I think I'll leave it alone, as it is already quieter than the other machines in the office.