Aside: Going down the "memory lane" of Intel motherboard codenames was fun. Tuscon II, Anchorage, Atlanta, Seattle, Maui, etc.

I really enjoyed Intel's desktop boards. They weren't particularly flashy, and there were certainly "duds" in there (early MU440EX revs not handling Pentium II CPUs properly, the whole RAMBUS debacle) but in general Intel made a solid (and not at all flashy) board.

With Intel's manufacturing competency you could be assured every board would be consistent. If there was a defect (I'm looking at you, MTH in the 820 chipset) every board would consistently have the same defect.