I spent most of the evening researching the various boards you've all suggested to me. I checked out ASUS, GIGABYTE, ABIT & MSI. I think i might end up going with ASUS for the main machine and will probably purchase a few of the other boards to experiment and play with. Everyone here seems to agree that ASUS is top of the line. I wonder if i'll go with an ASUS board on the server too? Hmmm.
I share in the sentiments of Hygor who mentioned the words i used as being "evil" (pentium & intel). I'm going to stick with AMD but i've noticed most of the server boards i've come across are pentium based. I'll have to do more looking into that though.