Whether you are buying now or waiting for Christmas money and the inevitable January sales, sooner or later you're going to have to make a choice on which motherboard to use. If you are an overclocker, you're going to want a BIOS that gives you control over the various voltages and timings to tweak your CPU and RAM to its full potential. If you are building a machine for use as a general/entertainment PC, you're going to want more features like onboard graphics to reduce noise and total cost, plenty of USB ports for all your peripherals, HDMI output for simple cabling, and so on. The chaps over at OCC have published a motherboard roundup to see ones are hot and which are not. Here's an excerpt:

Abit AN-M2HD - This motherboard manages to cram so many features in, it's hard to believe it all fits on a micro-ATX board! With VGA, DVI, HDMI and S/PDIF out of the box, you can connect this straight up to your flat screen TV, hook up the digital surround sound, and fit the motherboard in a sleek micro-ATX case to give you a fully featured entertainment/home cinema PC. Being able to manually set all the timings, speed and voltage values for the RAM means that you won't lose performance by the RAM being set to the SPD, which is almost always set looser than the specs for maximum compatibility

ECS AMD690GM-M2 - An equally impressive range of display connectivity: VGA, DVI, TV-out (standard defintion), support for a healthy 10 USB ports, but no S/PDIF output, and no control over the RAM timings.

Abit IP35 Pro - Abit does it again! Although not quite as overclockable as the ASUS P5K Deluxe, the Abit IP35 Pro comes within a whisker and for almost $40 less. Top-of-the-range performance for a very modest price.

DFI Lanparty UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R - This is the most expensive motherboard, probably mostly due to its scarcity, and you will almost certainly have trouble buying one new. This board deserves a mention though, as the range of voltage options in the BIOS gives you stability that you cannot get on any other 680i board, especially with Quad Core CPUs. So for SLI with a Core2 CPU, this is the king; continuing the legend of DFI Lanparty.