Also my new board showed up yesterday...a Gigabyte B75M-D3P. Current $95 on Newegg with a $20 MIR: (so ~$75 I guess)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128556
I chose this board for a few reasons: first of all, I don't currently use any expansion ports aside from GFX & PCI NIC. So I didn't go with a full ATX board, just a very basic MicroATX board. Although it's basic & inexpensive (sub-$100 is awesome!!), it supports the latest 1155-based Ivy Bridge i7 chips and up to 32 gigs of RAM (which is currently available for under $200, which is ridiculous). Also, it doesn't require a DSDT, which is really nice, and since it's an LGA-1155 board, you get Sleep & SpeedStep. I don't particularly care about either of those (mine is usually on 24/7 doing some project or another at full-tilt), but a lot of people have asked for boards that support those features, so why not.
It does have onboard video out, so if you want to go with integrated graphics (HD3000 or HD4000), you can (I believe there's an i3 with HD3000 for under $150 if you want to do a budget build). I'm going with my ATI 6870 (natively supported in Snow Leopard, at least) - I'm not a particularly big fan of ATI, but I've actually been having a lot of fun in Final Cut Pro X lately, and it really likes ATI cards, so there you go. Plenty of great Nvidia options available now as well, from the 640 to the 680.
The motherboard is not without its quirks - the USB 3.0 ports only work with USB 3.0 devices, so you lose a couple ports there if you need more USB 2.0 space. I've also read that 10.8.2 has some bootup issues, so I'll see how I fare this weekend during installation. I won't be using onboard audio or networking since I want native compatibility (through add-on hardware). So here's the current plan:
* i7-3770K CPU
* Gigabyte B75M-D3P motherboard
* 32GB RAM
* 1GB ATI 6870 GPU
* Encore PCI NIC (gotta see if it's still supported in ML)
* Syba USB stereo sound card
* Mushkin SSD for boot (and some multi-terabyte drives for storage)
* 4GB USB boot stick (for Chimera & the Extras folder)
* DVD burner
The goal of this project is to have a 100% Mac-only, pure-vanilla hard drive. All of the Hackintosh stuff will reside on the USB stick, which will be first in the BIOS's boot order. The network, audio, and graphics card are all natively-supported, so no re-patching of drivers required after doing updates. The performance will come from a combination of the i7 chip, 32 gigs of RAM, and SATA-III solid-state boot drive (plus a decently modern 6870 video card). I like to run a VM or two all the time, plus I do a lot of video stuff, so having a lot of RAM is really nice. I'll be using 4 sticks of 8GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill memory for $42 a pop, for a jaw-droppingly low price of $168 total for 32 gigs of RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231636
That tickles me