3 best motherboards for 3 different sockets/time frames?

[Vishera]

My buddy is entering a PC building competition to build the best possible computer for 3 different time frames: the era of XP, the era of Vista, and the era of 7. XP extends to 2005 when the next OS was "supposed" to be released, in order to expand the otherwise tiny Vista time frame, Vista goes from 2005 to 2009, and 7 goes from 2009 to 2012. I'm looking for suggestions on what motherboards to go with, primarily for the XP and Vista machines.

He's decided to go with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ for the XP machine, so Socket 939, and an i7 975 for the Vista machine, LGA 1366. I figured y'all might be better suited to suggest particular boards he should use. Unfortunately, I was a wee lad making his way through grade school when either of these CPUs came out, so I've no experience with the platforms.

Any suggestions for an LGA 2011 board for Sandy Bridge-E are welcome as well!

 

[Woomack]

939 is a tricky one as it's hard to tell if the best includes stability and endurance. DFI 939 LanParty series was the best for overclocking. There were 2-3 versions of this motherboard. The best overall, I don't know. I had a lot of RMA on DFI but the same on MSI back then. Other brands were not much better while were overclocking worse.

1366 - Rampage III Extreme
2011 - Rampage IV Extreme / Black Edition (in general the same boards)

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Socket 939-Probably the DFI nF4 SLI-DR Expert for overclocking ability. There was also the DFI SLI-DR Venus (A rare and stupidly over-priced board on the rare occasions I've seen them come up for sale, the last one I saw for sale was 5-6 years ago and sold for around $200 for a board from 2006.). It was a collector's edition of the SLI-DR Expert. Then there was also the DFI nF4 SLI-DR, I think the Expert had more BIOS options than the standard SLI-DR.

Failing to locate/acquire the DFI's, then an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe might do the trick (the Asus boards overclocked much more poorly though, the vCore maxed out at 1.45V if I remember correctly, which was somewhat low in my opinion.)

1366 - Rampage III Extreme or Rampage III Formula (I basically agree with Woomack).
2011 - Rampage IV Black Edition (Rampage IV Extreme had more issues with board randomly stopping being able to POST, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee you will encounter one that has this issue.)-Funsoul had one with this problem, and I know because I attempted to help troubleshoot it. It kept randomly varying the POST code that it stopped on, I remember 55 was one (RAM initialization) and there were several others.

Mind you, I'm just now seeing this thread, so the reply may no longer be relevant or helpful.