you know what i'm not going to get the M5A97, that won't do crossfire at 16x on both pci-e slots. i'm going with this instead

GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

its only $60 more and it will run a pair of radeon 7000 series cards in crossfire at full speed, so later when the gtx 480 is no longer powerful enough to keep up, i can easily upgrade, plus it has an internal usb 3.0 header, so i will be able to use the usb 3.0 ports on the front of the case, whereas that other board does not have that, its only usb 3.0 is on the back panel