Don't confuse price with value
You get what you pay for especially when there are embedded components involved. Take embedded sound for example... Between a value and a premium board, you might see a huge difference in cpu utilization and sound quality, plus the premium board will give you more connectors on the back ensuring that they can hook up to whatever speakers you have. Digital SPDIF, optical, plus the usual multiple audio-out ports, that sort of thing. How many USB ports? How good is the SATA RAID controller, and will it choke up the PCI bus or does it have a direct connection to the chipset and cpu?
That's why ya gotta shop around. There are less expensive ABIT boards for example, that offer fewer features but the ones they do have use high quality components. And there are feature packed boards that use crappy components. The Nvidia chipset boards are prime examples of this, since nvidia has included the ability to integrate very high quality sound and ethernet into the board by using features in the chipset itself, but many board manufacturers skip those built in chipset features and tack on cheap all in one chips that work but not nearly as well, and save only a few bucks per board. It's worth paying an extra $10-$20 for a board that uses good components.
That's how ABIT, ASUS, and other "premium" board makers get their loyal following, by not skimping on the bits and pieces that make up a quality board. In the end, you're often talking a difference from a $100 board up to a $130 board, but that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the overall cost of a system.
Power supplies are another component where it's a really bad idea to try to go cheap... The antec trupower series seems to have a good price/performance ratio according to the reviews, and if you skip the fancy gold anodized LED-enhanced versions, you can get a decent power supply from Antec for under $80. Enermax also has a decent reputation, but look for reviews on the web before buying.
