Best Intel based board for ~$200

After four long years it's finally time to build a new system. Of course now the big question is what motherboard is going to be mine? I'm going to use either a Q9450 or E8500 and a Radeon 4850. I plan on going Crossfire in the near future so I am looking at the x38 and x48 boards for their PCI bandwidth but am willing to get a p45 board if its a really good deal.

Which of these boards is the best of the bunch?

I'm open to other suggestions too. Frankly, I'm a little overwhelmed by the motherboard scene right now with all of its Ps and 5s and Es.

i would pick the p5q deluxe but your going xfire so maybe one of the x38 boards
Rich

Yeah thats what I'm thinking too. How about the P5E deluxe vs. the P5E. It's a x48 board thats cheaper than the x38 board.

For overclocking what CPU you choose makes a big difference, dual cores can overclock easily, even the cheaper motherboards have no problems getting them to high FSBs (500+). 45nm quads are a different story though.

P45 can do Crossfire with its dual 8X PCIe2 bandwith, the only time the bandwith can cause bottlenecking is at high resolutions, only somewhat at 1920x1200 and quite severly at 2560x1600, with the HD4000 series.

My monitor is 1920x1200 so I plan on gaming at that rez. Honestly, I'm looking for something thats fast and stable right out of the box instead of a pure, balls-to-the-wall overclocking board. I plan on doing some moderate OC'ing later when I have time and money for a good after market cooler.

Pretty much every P35, P45, and certainly X38 and X48 motherboards have good overclocking capacity, especially for stuff like 450-500FSB. An E8500 for instance would only need 421FSB to hit a 4ghz OC, an E8400 445FSB.

Its better to stick to the higher end brands however such as Asus, Gigabyte etc as they are almost always designed with some level of overclocking in mind. Cheaper stuff like Biostar, ECS this isn't always the case, though they will still have overclocking options.

So the biggest consideration for you should be the motherboard features (RAID, integrated audio etc) and the Crossfire support you want.

For 1920x1200 P45 is enough bandwith IMO, though you might see a small performance increase in using the full X48 Crossfire bandwith, don't know if its worth all the extra money though ($120 vs $200+).