My last board was a pain in the arse because it was so damn fussy about RAM. I had 4x512Mb of Crucial alue RAM. Ran fine in every other system I had at the rated speed of 3200 but the DFI Infinity wouldn't boot unless I ran it as PC2700. Whether that was a DFI thing or an Nforce4 thing I don't know, but I don't want any nasty surprises like that again
That was more to do with the Athlon 64 memory controller, it was fussy as hell at first and would only run 4 sticks at 333 Mhz but eventually the controller was refined enough to use 4 at 400.
Many motherboards defaulted to 333 for 4 sticks because otherwise it would fail to boot with older cores, that said it should have still worked once you manually adjusted it (providing the CPU core was up to it) but DFI are not known for producing easy to use BIOS. They are for dedicated enthusiast who want to be able to mess with everything, while Abit offer a much simpler BIOS (but with everything you need).
Any motherboard based on an Intel chipset will be at a base level, reliable and mature but when you talk about dependable it then depends on the manufacturer. There are some who fit the board with insufficient power regulation for the CPUs used (look at the 780G and Phenom CPU troubles reported on bit-tech and anandtech for a start) and fit questionable components (cheap caps is common) that are unable to cope with the strain (heat is often deadly) and the board dies an early death.
Most (if not all) of Abits enthusiast parts for the last few years have used high quality caps (often Rubycon) and been fitted with decent components elsewhere. The uGuru chip gives great fan and temperature control (on the IP35-Pro) but the software leaves something to be desired. BIOS support is for the most part ok (the AW9D-MAX supports Wolfdale CPUs which it was never intended to) and QA is pretty decent (but like all manufacturers a few bad ones slip through).
In general an Abit board is fairly priced, uses decent (but not spectacular) components and will be as durable as anything else out there. The IP35-Pro would serve you well (as it already has done for many others).