Pros: And i wouldnt have used a different board. this is an amazing board. all of its qualities and extras are so nice and easy to use. stylish colors and heatsinks.

Cons: not a one.

Other Thoughts: amazing board. highly recommend

Pros: This board has not disappointed me. ASUS once again lives up to it's name. Everything was as advertised, and worked perfectly.

Cons: Pin placement is a bit frustrating, specifically for case peripheral and case power connections. The PC speaker, power LED, Power, Reset etc pins are way down in the very bottom-left corner of this board, which made cable management a bit more frustrating than it could have been. This is the only complaint I have about this board.

Other Thoughts: A great board, though not perfect. I will definitely continue to use these boards for my customers, as they are high quality and offer great performance for the price. I may have placed the case pins in a more easily accessible location, were I designing the board, but aside from that, I have nothing but good things to say about this board.

Pros: As soon as I got this board, I threw in my new AMD Phenom II 965 x4 CPU and CrossFireX'd a pair of ATI 5770's with relative ease. Booted up the computer and everything was a go. Games will never be the same!

Cons: The InstAll program that comes with the motherboard is dangerous. Do NOT install the VIA HD Audio Codec. Endless problems with this program and the support/website/language being based in Taiwan made it 10x worse. The codec cannot uninstall, and I had to end up formatting my HDD just to get rid of the pesky thing. I'm sticking with Realtek Audio from now on.

VIA Audio made this package lose an egg; it was horrible.

Other Thoughts: More about VIA Audio!

-Website is impossible to navigate for the latest drivers. Couldn't tell which one I had, either.

-Trying to uninstall the software brings up an uninstall wizard that is in complete broken English.

-Many hours of adjusting the settings n the VDeck resulted in no changes to the static quality of my headset that was working with an old Audio Driver on my old mobo.

Motherboard is great, install everything, but the VIA Audio software from the disc.

Pros: Looks good in a box.
It really is a good design, no really I mean it, it is a good design.

Cons: It would help if it had a working NB.

Other Thoughts: yeah I'm another burnt customer on an ASUS MB, big surprise right? well actually I'd love to say YES!!{I'm so surprised I have to rma this!!!} but every NON server grade MB i have ever purchased from asus has been doa or a 1 week rma. I get the next MB and it works great. Is it possible to rma an item before i even order it, so I can have a working MB the first time a round?? ASUS don't bother with the valued customer speech I know how it goes. Just do something with the Quality of your MB, so this stuff don't happen. I ordered this about 1 month a go but just received the ram for it so I know I don't qualify for 30day rma blah blah blah warranty.

Pros: All said and done the board is fine, just some disappointments along the way.

Cons: The board does not have a motherboard diagnostic speaker soldered onto it. It does however provide a power connector for it.

The paper documentation that shipped with the board states that the BIOS flash and RAID drivers need to be done via floppy drive (USB). However a USB flash (thumb) drive will work.

ASUS support is not very timely and they do not read your e-mails very thoroughly when replying.

Pros: All systems go out of the box
Firmware upgrades are easy
Win 7 loaded nicely - once RAID configuration was figured out.

Cons: It's disappointing to lose a PCIe slot because of a large video card
Setting up RAID is not even close to what is described in the manual.

Other Thoughts: If you want to raid:
1. Install your Hard drives on Channels on SATA ports 1-4 and Optical Drive/s on the sideways SATA ports 5-6
2. Start by building your array - During POST, use the CTRL-F function to set the drives up when prompted to do so.
3. Enter BIOS and on the first page select Storage configuration
4. Change SATA 1-4 to RAID This will also change 5-6 to RAID
5. Chnge 5-6 back to IDE - Press ESC
6. Tab to the Boot menu in BIOS
7. Change Boot sequence to 1. CD/DVD ROM - 2. RAID
8. Save and exit (F10)

Step 5 & 7 are crucial if setting up raid.

Pros: Same ASUS quality. Installation was a no brainer. I applied power and it booted right up. You can ask for more than that.

Cons: I'm still waiting to discover one.

Other Thoughts: Bought this and an amd phenom II 945W as a replacement for an old ASUS A8N-SLI. It was a drop-in exchange. Didn't even have to tweak the debian linux OS except to add big-mem kernel to access the 4 gig of ram. It's up and running for five months without a hiccup.

Pros: Good BIOS, OC friendly, unlocked my Athlon x3 440 to a quad. It's a mobo.

Cons: Had an issue with my Corsair TX650. Board wouldn't POST, no beeps, unless I left it off and unplugged for 10+ hours, then it wouldn't POST again. Gave up after a week and brought it into where I bought it and let them fix it, tech guy said it was an incompatibility between the PSU and mobo, swapped to an Antec EW 650w, works fine now. Not taking an egg off, as it wasn't the mobo's fault, just thought I'd warn everyone.

Pros: The board is very slick looking with all AMD black hardware the look is excellent. On paper this is a very good board, and when it is working it pretty much lives up to that billing.

Cons: Stability is very poor, in6 months my system crashed 4 times, all were traced back to issues on the board. Now the board itself is out of commission. Nothing is displaying through the video connections at all.

ASUS support is difficult to reach, the phone number is no longer valid, online support in uncommunicative. Sending the board in to RMA service has resulted in me out the cost of shipping this (plus 2 inches of padding on all sides) twice with nothing to show for it.

Other Thoughts: One day I restarted my computer and on reboot I got no video, not even the mother board screens. There are no beeps on post, all fans come on, lights on the Video card come on, Hard drive is working. I have swapped the video cards with no change, my card works in other computers. I've placed all my parts onto a new board and I can boot successfully. I have replaced the cables, I have replaced the monitor, none of these has resulted in any video being displayed.
I received my Motherboard back from RMA service today, placed it back into my case and started everything up, and same problem as before. I've received zero communication from ASUS on what was done, and what was found, the board I have received back seems to have nothing done to it.
I am upset that I have paid to ship my board in to be repaired under the warranty and nothing appears to have been done to it. I've been without my computer for a month now and it looks like it will only be longer. I will have to go with an MSI.

Pros: This is an update to my review of 4/19/2010.

This is still a nice little board, great features, relatively easy to set up, and generally pretty stable running Gentoo for months without reboot. Price was right. I'm running Virtualbox, and have 2 Windows and 1 Ubuntu VM running a lot of the time, no sweat.

Cons: First time powerup was fine (this is good). Rebooting without poweroff is fine (this is good too).

But, if I actually shutdown (oh, the temerity!), or cycle power, I get memory errors on restart.

This manifests sometime during the OS launch - POST completes fine, OS starts to load, and some time later the whole thing just fails. Rebooting with memtest86 and running that for a while, test 5 or 6 shows tens of thousands of memory errors, all in the same address bit. It is like 1 address bit just drops.

This is corrected by opening the case, removing and reseating the memory sticks. Nothing else. Honest. I couldn't believe it.

I don't poweroff very often, maybe 4 or 5 times since I built the box. Same issue every time. Same solution every time.

Other Thoughts: For me, for my desktop, this is really annoying but noncatastrophic, as I can pop the case after a poweroff. For my next computer, an unattended server, it is a non-starter.

I don't know if this is a problem with this board rev, or the RAM, or the combination. This comes back to a comment I made on my previous review: the memory compatibility list published by ASUS isn't very helpful, as it list few if any sticks that are available in this country, or available any more. I really wanted to buy memory certified with this board. I couldn't find even 1 option that would add up to 8GB RAM that was actually available in the US.

Board rev 1.02g
Bios 0704
4 sticks G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600