When I first built my computer four years ago, I was still pretty new to computer parts and the companies that made them. I did my homework on motherboards before I picked one. I knew that Shuttle wasn't exactly one of the top names, but this particular board, AK 32, got really good reviews. The words "pleasantly surprised" showed up a lot. Also, it had slots for both SD RAM and DDR RAM. This was when DDR was still pretty new and people were still debating on whether or not it would catch on, so I wanted to play it safe and be able to use either type of RAM. I never did manage to get that board to register my processor's full speed. I have an AMD Athalon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz processor, but the boot screen always said that it was 1050 MHz (I don't remember if that was the exact number, but it was somewhere around 1 GHz).