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I'm stuck between one of these two motherboards. The Chaintech looks appealing due to the C-Media sound w/ the optical output but the Asus uses the NForce APU which I read was more powerful than the C-Media. The Asus board also includes 2 onboard NICs. Also the Chaintech uses a Promise SATA controller while Asus uses a Silicon Images controller. I also read that the Asus has a much better board layout. My main concern is with the sound. I know the CMedia chip is good, is the NForce 2 APU better than the CMedia?

One more thing, I will be coupling this board with a Radeon 9700 Pro, XP2400+, and 2x256MB PC3200 CAS2 Corsair XMS RAM with dual 80GB 8MB buffer drives RAID0 with a Promise TX2000 controller.

The onboard sound seems to sound good to me, crystal clear like my Audigy