Looking for an mATX mobo

[manic111]

To be running inside a Silverstone SG01, with a 4870 1gb, 4gb of Kingston 6400 RAM and a Corsair HX520 PSU.

I'm looking at either the AMD Phenom II x4 945 or the Intel Q9400 CPU, and am edging towards the AMD simply as I've never tried an AMD chip before, and performance seems pretty identical.

SO I need a motherboard (and have no idea what I'm looking for!)

Spec-wise, the Gigabytes look like good boards, and if they get strong recommendations on here I'll go for one; however, my current board, a P35c-DS3r, has been pretty unstable and dodgy ever since getting it a couple of years ago, so I'm a little wary of Gigabyte.

Finally, I am right in thinking that you can run an AM3 chip in an AM2+ board aren't I?

When installing the 4870, I assume that I'd have to "switch off" the integrated GPU - is this easy to do through the BIOS?

EDIT: Should have said that I don't really want to spend more than £100 on this, as I will probably switch it out for an AM3 board within a year or so.

 

[pieman109]

"MSI M3-F Intel G31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard" If you wanna go intel.

I've got this mobo running with a 4870 1gb, E5200 @3.135ghz, and 2 x 2gb kingston pc8500. Runs extremely well at these settings and hardware, had no probs setting up, alittle bit lacking in overclocking bios options but better than say the asus equivalent I tried.

 

[manic111]

Have always liked the look of MSI boards; are there any compatibility issues at all between AM3 chips and AM2+ boards, or do they simply drop in and play?

My main problem with buying Intel now is that I'll want to upgrade to i7 when they become affordable which will mean swapping the board, CPU and RAM. Whereas if I buy an AM3 chip now, all I'll have to do is switch out the board and the RAM and hey presto, I'm all AM3!!!

EDIT: That said, it sounds like there are still some compatibility issues, mostly due to power requirements, between some AM2 boards and AM3 chips, so I may not take the risk and just go Intel. Hmm...