Skruntie dont go for the fastest mobo-ram-cpu route ..next year you can buy them nearly half price..
instead you can buy a good mobo with medium configuration..and load it later..
and go for a mobo with many type of slots and without a gpu on board.. or you will face many problems like me 
also check toms hardware guides..
I never rush out and buy the new equipment cem. The only reason I ended up with the system I have now is that a mate wanted a system building and he "Dictated" the parts list and I had to use DDR2 which was just released on the market at the time and the price was stupid. Any way I suffered a lot of issues includind a DOA hard drive and an Asus motherboard that worked perfecfectly on the bench but had issues when built into a case. So I ended up with 2 of everything trying to get stuff to be compatable.
Both my mate and myself are now for new computers and my mate has accepted he gets what he is told this time.
I used to keep reasonably up to date by buiding a new computer and then someone was often in the market for a new one so I allways sold mine as used but tried and tested and gave them 12 months on all the parts as a warranty, surprising how often they came back for annother.
Because of that particular build, and compairing Asus to Gigabyte, then Gigabyte won on speed, perforance, cost for more or less the same spec boards and bios.
I will add, all though I dont use Asus anymore, I have had quite a few on various sockets (CPU) and find them generally geared for realiability, rather than speed. Used a lot of boards from thier sister company as well.
Regardsless of brand though, they all make some good and some bad boards, at times it's just about doing the home work.