most people with bad axe's have modded them. afaik some of the basic overclocking options are completely missing until you get it into engineer mode, which requires a mod, though i think its only something like connecting two traces with conductive ink , though possibly might need a resistor. all of the people with really massive overclocks have several different and not easy mods done for sure. out of the box it will be stable but has very few options, i believe it does have basic fsb clocking, but no voltage controls at all. i think the basic mod gives you cpu voltage, theres a whole thread on xtremesystems about it, not read it though just picking stuff up from other threads.
asus/dfi are the best out of the box solutions now.
quite frankly, in the past 5 years, anything gigabyte, asus, epox, dfi(last 18 months only), abit(most iffy but still pretty decent), msi(buggy as hell software and weird bios's, generally bad design) and probably others i've missed all perform very similarly. i've not met a single really good board that has let me overclock the same cpu more than 1-2% further than any other board. same goes for memory and other parts for overclocking. theres been little to separate motherboards for a long time, an intel chipsets and intel chipset, a nvidia chipset is an nvidia chipset. everyones using the same tech so unsurprisingly limits and performance are very similar, very.
its been the case for as long as i can remember that the lowest end £60 gigabytes will overclock the same as a dfi and gigabytes own £150 motherboards, its just on board spec that changes, and bundles(which generally look nice but are pretty much unused). for now you're kinda stuck with expensive boards, the P5B for £117 has stock available in the uk now, give it 2 weeks and we should have a £80 gigabyte available and plenty of other boards.
