[caberus]

almost 10 years ago i wrote vhdl code on spartan series cards, and that time i noticed that Xilinx IDE was really far from Visual Studio. hope things have changed since then. So my suggestion is to check development tools as well, if you dont need the "best" board just, but also the ease of development

[planteen]

The Spartan series and Xilinx ISE are dead now. The new future is Vivado and 7 series FPGAs. I guess Vivado is better in some ways but it's integration with version control software is pathetic.