So I hurt two people's feeling 'cause I stated the obvious? While your intention was good, you should've stated this is purely a thread created to promote Asus products. It's unfortunate that Gigabyte DS3 and a number of other mobos didn't work for you, and Asus mobos magically do, but a lot of other consumers and overclockers purchased Gigabyte DS3 mobos and have absolutely no problem running it and getting great OC from it.
DS3-DS6: Horrible Bios support, still many of the features are broken, boot up time to windows is also 7 seconds more from than P5B from my experience. You also need to find a golden board. There is a huge range, first one I tried did 380 FSB, next one did 480, no consistency on chips.
I got DS3 to work right out of the box w/ F3 BIOS. Never had a problem getting any of the features to work. Bootup time's quick. I don't know what kind of golden board you're talking about, but I'm using the highly hated and incompatible OCZ RAM on my DS3 and it runs perfectly fine. Just because a mobo doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's a dud for everybody else. If people don't know any better and read your extended Asus promotional post, they'll all run off to buy Asus and act like it's the only mobo they should buy.
Well it is a good board, it is just is a bit harder to configure, and you need to addd active cooling to the northbridge. Any time you see it with a high fsb it is not with the stock aluminum heatsink
See no difference w/ and w/o a fan on the DS3 NB. Same NB temperature and same stability w/ 425FSB. Buy a good case w/ good air flow and you wouldn't need to dish out another $20-$30 for a NB HSF for added aesthetics.