There is a small fee involved to enable SLI and Crossfire on mobos. So you have to spend a little more to get both on a mobo.

ASUS makes the most mobos of all the manufacturers. Can't go wrong there. I would say next up on the scale would be Gigabyte. EVGA sells mostly reference boards and really has the best service reputation as far as warranty and RMAs there are in the industry. Nothing wrong with Intel, just usually have all overclocking options disabled so if you want to OC, stay away from Intel. MSI makes some good boards, I just don't have much experience with them. I know they make a lot of OEM boards for like HP and eMachines.

The colonel suggests saving money on the PSU. If you are wanting to go with two cards in the future, you should really make sure you get a good name brand PSU in the 800 up watt category as 650W for SLI of Crossfire might work, but I've seen too many issues with PSUs being loaded to the max and causing reboots and data loss.

There are some general rules for building a good overclockable system. Don't try to save money on the mobo and get a good top tier manufacturer like ASUS or Gigabyte. Don't scrimp on memory like buying OEM or no-name. and don't scrimp on the PSU.

Thanks Speedbump for the tips. But I actually don't want to do sli. I was wondering whether a nvidia card works on a crossfire board or if it even matters. I would like just one card and a quality board.

Yes a Nvidia card will work in a crossfire board. And a ATI card will work in a Nvidia board.

Thanks a bunch.

The thing is though that I generally expect Nvidia chipsets to be "smoother" with Nvidia cards.

Generally speaking, if you buy an AMD, you can buy the chipset (790GX) and the GFX card all from the same company, so you get a "pure" system with the components especially certified to work trouble free with each other.

If you are onto Intel, you can get a Nvidia chipset and a Nvidia card, also reducing potential troubles.

In normal ops, it should all work mixed togehter, but I'm a big fan of minimizing potential trouble causes, so I'm not a fan of running an ATI-optimized mobo with a Nvidia card.