Gigabyte's feature-laden 925XE-based GA-8AENXP-D is a rare board. It's one of the few we have yet seen to offer 800Mbps FireWire 800. It includes other touches as well: eight SATA ports, an additional RAID controller to augment the one in the 925XE chip set, and the company's DualBIOS, which provides a backup BIOS in case you interrupt a flash or screw up the settings in the main BIOS and can't boot. Gigabyte rounds out the package with an 802.11g wireless LAN adapter card and a solid voltage regulator module for stability.

Another strength of the GA-8AENXP-D is performance, with the board performing very well in our tests. Add good documentation, a decent range of overclocking settings, and capable Windows-based tweaking utilities, and you have a very nice Pentium 4 setup--almost nice enough to make us forget its high price.