I’m running a Gigabyte

[swoon]

I’m running a Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 board with the i3-530 and it has been solid. Yes, it has the Realtek NIC and Intel NICs are generally superior, but for HTPC use, the Realtek on this board has been perfectly adequate. I recommend not buying this board though if you don’t have PCI cards because it has a 2x PCI + 2x PCIe configuration instead of 3x PCIe + 1x PCI configuration. PCI peripherals are a dying breed these days.

I can also say that a 10s boot on this board is not realistic. It probably takes that long to load the BIOS + discs.