Gigabyte GA-G1975x

The Gigabyte GA-G1975x motherboard looks beautiful thanks to the blue LED's in the Turbofans, so make sure you have a case with a transparent window in it or something, so that you can see it.

The Intel 975 chipset makes it zip along pretty quickly, but of course it depends what you put on it. My setup is a Pentium 4 630 and 2x 512MB DDR II RAM (in dual channel), and it is very fast.

It is pretty ideal as a gamers board, because of the easiness to overclock it. There's no integrated video, but most gamers will probably buy a decent graphics card anyway, so no need for the video card. Also, it includes 2 PCI Express x16 slots, so you can do Crossfire and SLI (it comes with an SLI bridge, but unfortunately another review said they didn't manage to get it working. I don't know whether it is possible or not, but take the risk because it is awesome).

The integrated sound is pretty damn good - Creative's Sound Blaster Live 24-bit. It includes various outputs and extension jacks, so if you like you can turn your room into a 7.1 home entertainment system.