Upgrading a Zotac H55ITXCE.. suggestions?

[replicant]

So, I've been off and on wanting to upgrade this non-fully-supported Zotac H55ITX-CE (the AE seems to be way more supported) to another non-Gigabyte mini-itx board (preferably one that can support up to 16GB, supported onboard audio, gigabit ethernet, I've got a supported NVIDIA 250GTS that I've been using the past few years now, and lastly, preferably supported USB3.

The main reasons I'm wanting to avoid Gigabyte is due to their boot loop issues (which I've had on 2 Gigabyte boards in the past).

I'd preferably like to stick to the mini-itx form factor so that I can keep my existing (overly expensive) silverstone case. I'm hoping my existing 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM will work on the newer chipsets, so I'm thinking I'd get an i5-2500k and then the recommended mini-itx board.

Any suggestions?

This box is primarily used for my "work" stuff, e.g., development in ruby, but also running virtualbox for windows7 environments to dev in visual studio 2010, and sql server 2008 r2. VERY light gaming by way of certain supported Steam games (nothing too graphics intensive).

I really appreciate it. I'm just hoping for a fully supported mini-itx board (that is not made by Gigabyte).

 

[wfj]

So, I've been off and on wanting to upgrade this non-fully-supported Zotac H55ITX-CE (the AE seems to be way more supported) to another non-Gigabyte mini-itx board (preferably one that can support up to 16GB, supported onboard audio, gigabit ethernet, I've got a supported NVIDIA 250GTS that I've been using the past few years now, and lastly, preferably supported USB3.

The main reasons I'm wanting to avoid Gigabyte is due to their boot loop issues (which I've had on 2 Gigabyte boards in the past).

I'd preferably like to stick to the mini-itx form factor so that I can keep my existing (overly expensive) silverstone case. I'm hoping my existing 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM will work on the newer chipsets, so I'm thinking I'd get an i5-2500k and then the recommended mini-itx board.

Any suggestions?

This box is primarily used for my "work" stuff, e.g., development in ruby, but also running virtualbox for windows7 environments to dev in visual studio 2010, and sql server 2008 r2. VERY light gaming by way of certain supported Steam games (nothing too graphics intensive).

I really appreciate it. I'm just hoping for a fully supported mini-itx board (that is not made by Gigabyte).

The AsRock mini-itx boards are supported well on this board. Don't remember the exact model numbers off the top of my head. Check the user builds section of the forum.