Everybody who would fiddle around one hour with a lot of expansion cards would notice that the USB occupies an IRQ - no matter if you use it or not. The second thing I have to criticize is the poor support of large memory modules. If I get a BX board I want it to run with all available sizes of memory available. Freaks and performance fanatics won't be happy with this, but risking system stability for a half per cent performance is not worth it. The BX chipset has proved to be fast and flexible.
Most manufacturers make even more of it by providing good motherboards.
Slot 1 will be Intel's base socket of new CPUs for the next months, so you can expect that Katmai will run in every BX motherboard with just a BIOS update. On the other hand AMD has proved to be able to beat Intel's next generation processors and it's difficult to say which will be the fastest CPU in the beginning of 1999. We don't know what's about the future of Socket 7, but a good BX board is with a good future now since it's certain that Intel will remain at Slot 1. If you now want to build a computer which is meant to be quite up to date for a longer time, a BX board should be take into account. All boards have in common that they should run very problem free, fast and reliable.