Stability and compatibility are the two most important items of a motherboard to me. After all, when virtually every motherboard based upon the same chipset performs within 2% of another, then it becomes a matter of features, stability and compatibility to differentiate one 865 motherboard from another.

Stability of the AX4SPE is excellent. Running both Prime95 for 24 hours and Burninpro for 12 hours, no errors of any kind were observed. In addition, I spent a week doing everyday usage for things like playing games, writing emails, running Office programs etc.. The P4 2.8 was by default clocked at 2.813 GHz, which is a slight overclock from the 2.8 GHz default setting.

Compatibility is also important. After all, there are times when a component has problems with a motherboard. Last year, for example, there were well documented problems with a Parhelia and a nForce2 and a Radeon 9700 Pro with certain boards that support AGP 8x. I tried both a AIW 9800 Pro, and the Ti4200 8x 128MB in AGP 8x mode. Both were correctly identified and installed in AGP 8x mode.

Other compatibility testing involved installing all 6 of my hard drives. I have 2 120GB ATA133 HDDs, 2 60GB ATA100 hdds and 2 30GB ATA66 hdds. All hard drives were correctly identified as to their rating and installed correctly as they would on any 865 based motherboard. It's good to test in any event, as sometimes there's an issue with this.