Budget board?

I'm a big fan of asus all my previous boards being asus and i'm wondering whats the best bang for the buck now days? I'm building a rig for a friend and he's on a budget of about 1000$ for the whole system

well in that budget he has lots of options. but some specifics are going to be needed before you can get any good suggestions. quad or dual? gaming? crossfire? oc'ing? etc. .. . .

well for his uses (playing wow all day) im thinking dual, quad would just be a waste and i don't like the heat if you're not even using it to its full potential. I'm thinking about having him order a 4850 (one for now maybe crossfire eventually) and I am an OC addict lol so I am planning on overclocking it for him.

I highly recommend the P5Q Pro. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131299

The only downside is it only has an 8x link in crossfire. However, if your friend will only be running one GPU - at least to start with - then it won't factor in initially. Also, I just came across an article that showed extensive testing of 2 x8 vs. 2 x16 crossfire and the result were that the 2 x8 didn't bottleneck much. I think Crysis showed the biggest gap and it was only around 10%.

The P5Q Pro paired with an E8xxx CPU makes for an awesome gaming combo.