As far as i know, the problem is with the Nforce chipset , not the processors. nVidia gave the manufacturer's some specs that they didnt / had troubles implementing and that resulted in a whole lot of "dead" mobos, with IDE/SATA problems and soundstorm glitches. But then again, it was (was) a small number.
That, v'mods and some extreme overclocking , with poor voltage regulators (not poor, but not very good either) / out of specs power consumptions due to those "leet OC's" (i've seen a few, just because it said can take 14 amps, doesnt mean it can actually work 24/7 with 14 amps) , equals even more returns.
That's why there was so many dead ABit and Epox mobos (mainly). And not counting the 2nd rate capacitor incident, which Abit had to replace a good number of them. Anyway, my 0.02 about that. Maybe i'm wrong, and they just suck
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Im an AMD fan. They're cheap, they are reliable (havent had a problem yet, i still have a k6-2 and athlon 750 , both in working order) , they have good performance for the price (Barton's are really really cheap, getting one soon) so I see no need to buy something almost 3x expensive , just "because" it's Intel, when i can get all the performance i need for less.
As stability goes, i had a k7s5a earlier with SiS chipset, which i might add, is very good, under-rated most of the times. Rock solid. Changed to a Asus a7n8x , and still no real problems*. As features wise.... there is a whole lot of packages with just about everything you can think of.
* Doesnt like my OCZ memory. Works fine with my Kingston modules thou. And the OCZ was tested in 2 others motherboards and checks out, no problems. Weird stuff. Oh well, time to upgrade.