Mainboards offer less operating choices as time goes by. IRQ's were assignable on 440BX mainboards, I think. This feature is seemingly almost history--leaving the ability of sophisticated OS's to do this out of the picture. Not everyone wants Win2K.
To be fair, this isn't the fault of the mainboard manufacturer's as much as it is of the chipset maker's. Intel may be swell. All the same, memory performance took a nosedive after the i440BX chipset. Viz, the vci820, i810 and i815 chipsets. This regression, dare I say repression of memory throughput performance was not necessary. It was marchitecture--technology for the benefit of the manufacturer--not the consumer. Rambus just had to appear to be a good memory choice when compared to PC-100 and PC-133 Sdram.
Thanks, Chipzilla! A billion wasted consumer bucks on these three poor performance chipsets. We paid for it, of course. Does this make us the fool? Shuh!
Personally, I think Asus's design teams and QC ain't what they used to be. I no longer see Asus mainboards as the best.