LXi, with all due respect to Anand and everyone, I have to agree with much you said. The whole emphasis it seemed in deciding the top 3 rewards was on overclocking and the ability to use all 4 DIMM slots. I honestly think that especially in KR7A-RAID's place considering that the Dragon+, and A7V266-E, not to mention Shuttle AK35 GTR. I will say this though about the stability testing, realize that it is difficult to test the stability of a board. I think that the best way is by every day use, obviously that can;t be done in this setting, I do agree though that I wish he would do the 24 hour crash tests. I would not be too hard on Anand, really, I think something to keep in mind is that in deciding what board to get today, it lies so much in what your situation is. I mean, the A7V266-E/Dragon+/K7T266 Pro2-RU provide great features despite they aren't the best overclockers but still keep in mind that they are decent ocer's. I guess, what I would've liked to see is not a "This one is the best, and this one is the 2nd best." thing, I have gotten the feeling from Anand's comments that modern boards are all pretty much stable, but I guess I would like some kind of hard evidence showing this, but do keep in mind what I noted above. I think what I would've liked to see is like which are the bad apples, and evalluate the features of these boards.
Another thing that bother me was the way fsb overclocking testing was done. From what I see, all of the big names(Asus, Abit, MSi, EpoX, Gigabyte, and IWill) all did get to above 160fsb. And even a few unexpected suprises did above 160fsb (Soyo, Soltek, Shuttle). And I guess, seriously, I think that overclocking the fsb it really is best to not bring the mem bus out of sync, because that defeats the fsb overclocking. I'd rather push my board to 166fsb/mem clock and then stop rather than lower the mem to 133MHz and up the fsb to 185 for example on the KR7A. My point is that many of these boards will hit or get very close to 166fsb, and really, either PC2700 DDR or even Crucial PC2100 maybe if you're lucky will hit this as well and that's good enough for me. Then just give me a good range of vcore and DDR voltages and I'll be all set. My point again is that most of these boards will do decent overclocking, sure it may not be good enough for the most extreme overclocker but still it is good.
I'm probably being more negative than I want to be. I think the best way to sum up my thoughts about this roundup is, that he didn't give enough credit to the middle of the pack boards, that IMHO offered better features than KR7A and 8KHA+. Don't get me wrong, 8KHA+ and KR7A are great boards, but I think their (and to a lesser extent XP333-R) "incredible" overclocks were totally blown out of porportion and really, I doubt a KR7A running at 185fsb/133mem clock will be faster than a KR7A running at 166fsb/166mem clock. So the bottom line is I think a tad more attention needs next time to be paid to Features/Price/Stability.
