Good socket 754 motherboard for gaming

[Med]

I'm looking to upgrade my current POS motherboard to something a little more reliable. I already locked myself into a s754 CPU, so I wanted to see if there were any quality motherboards that won't fry or burn up if I play for long periods of time.

These are the ones I've been looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128259
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131512

Is there any difference in these two besides the brand and the price?

There is also the PRO version of the Gigabyte mobo:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128241

Is the chipset fan on this worth it? Will it have any effect at all on performance?

Or is there a better motherboard out there that I haven't found?

I have a 400w Antec Smartpower 2.0 PSU, and an AGP ATI Radeon 9550. All my drives are IDE, and will probably stay that way for a while.

[ror_b211]

Socket 754's are not future-proof and getting out of date already. Look for a socket 939 for A64.

[glc]

I already locked myself into a s754 CPU

Let's give the poster S-754 board recommendations, please.

Between those 2, I'd take the Asus. You will also improve the gaming performance considerably with a higher end video card.

This would be the best S-754 board out there, but it's PCI-Express, not AGP - if you are prepared to upgrade your video card this is the way to go:

ASUS K8N4-E DELUXE Socket 754 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131533

[Med]

Originally Posted by ror_b211 Socket 754's are not future-proof and getting out of date already. Look for a socket 939 for A64.

Hindsight is 20/20.

As far as upgrading to the PCI-E, the above applies as well, and since I just barely bought the AGP card, I don't think I can bring myself to spend money to replace it yet. It does the job I need it to fairly well, especially considering what I was upgrading it from.

One thing that I am doing with this build though, is trying to work out a good cooling system. I'm pretty clueless though, since in all my previous computers, the only cooling fans I had were on the PSU and the CPU. Under what circumstances does a chipset require a fan, or is the fan on that Gigabyte PRO just for show?

[glc]

Stock cooling will be plenty adequate for those particular components.