BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

Pros: Price - in this price range there are few boards that offer as much.
Quality - I've had two boards ( more on that below ) and both have looked fantastic with no cheapness evident anywhere. For a budget brand name you expect a little corner cutting but there was none to be found here.

Cons: This is a niggling con but it does deserve mentioning. I would have appreciated more fan headers. I have a HAF case and water cooling so my needs were extreme, still I feel there should have been two more as this is an enthusiasts board.

Other Thoughts: I originally bought this board a few months ago and then did something I've not done in all my years of building my own computers. I dropped the CPU into the socket damaging the pins. An expensive mistake to be sure. Instead of blaming bent pins on the manufacturer I owned up, and bought another board. I had choices and returned to this one again. It was a breeze to set up my SSD boot drive and found all 32 gigs of ram that was installed. Couldn't ask for much more.

Pros: Great color scheme that matches my custom build well. Matte black PCB and orange is a perfect orange (nothing too red, etc). BIOS is OK, most mice don't work in it (unless you have a ps/2 mouse laying around)! Got my 3570k to 4.8 on water, would like to go higher, but it doesn't want to w/o a significant voltage increase (could be the chip too). Post time w OC applied and BIOS stripped down a little makes for one of the best POST times out there (love that part). Mix it with a OC'd chip on a -good- SSD and you'll be booted up before you can (fill in blank here).

Cons: No 4pin molex on-board (but I know I shouldn't expect that at this price point). OC settings are applied prior to post, so if it fails to boot, you have to reset cmos, because the BIOS will actually lock up if the OC attempt isn't stable. You may spend a lot of time resetting default values each time you have to reset- AHCI is not enabled by default, for example. Top PCIEx16 slot is REALLY close to ram levers. If you have a GPU with a backplate (like a EVGA 680, for example), it'll be right up against the levers of the ram, so good luck getting your ram out without a hassle.

Other Thoughts: I'm happy with the purchase overall. Couldn't have found a better color scheme for what I wanted as the end result (although the red LED under the audio chipset doesn't really match anything?). The board runs really well/stable (once you get your OC right). Haven't had a Biostar in about 7 years, so I was due for another. No network until you install drivers. Included software is mostly junk, but who uses included mobo software anyway? :)

Looking at the board as it sits in a tower case- from top down, Sata ports are Sata III, Sata II, Sata II and another Sata III (on an off-brand controller) that doesn't actually provide real Sata III speeds (based on other reviews) (have not verified any speed difference personally). Plug your SSDs into the top two ports.

Pros: Reasonably priced
Good not great features
Easy to install

Cons: ESATA port never worked
Terrible support

Other Thoughts: I've had the Mobo for about 1 month and it has been very solid. I would really like the ESATA port to work, given I paid for the feature. After having an initial email exchange with support, they no longer acknowledge my emails. Very disappointing, but I guess if you need support this is NOT the Mobo for you.

Pros: -Overclocking is fairly straightforward.*
-Visually appealing
-I bought it more so for the layout, at least one of each slot can be used with SLI or Crossfire.
-4 SATA III connections**

Cons: -*The v droop is sort of opposite of what more popular brands implement.
-Less Biostar users compared to other brands so information is harder to find, especially for specific parts.
-The on-board Ethernet port is a bit funky on my board, sometimes the cable needs to be jiggled a bit for it to register (the connection light helps).
-**Perhaps it's the cables I'm using, but I'm not getting the full 6Gb/s with my SATA III HDDs from the connections, but the SSD is fine.

Other Thoughts: I didn't receive the orange SATA cables, I had gotten black ones; I was a bit disappointed, but it's not much of a matter.

1 egg off for every con and the cables, though if each were seperated, no eggs would be removed.

Pros: Comes with little buttons on the motherboard for power and resetting so a test boot is easy. There's an interface on the motherboard for temperature of the CPU, which helps me a lot considering my case doesn't have great airflow, although some cases might obscure this interface. Everything is simple to install and remove. The manual helped immensely.

Cons: The CPU fan installation was a little difficult. The motherboard didn't have any notice of which way to install the CPU fan, and I ended up putting it in wrong twice because the CPU fan's power cord couldn't reach the slot. I also noticed the motherboard seemed a bit large when I was installing it, but that could very well have been my case.

Other Thoughts: There seems to be some useless bulk on the board, that may or may not be important at all. It looks like some of it might be for water cooling, but I have no idea how that works so I don't know. I don't feel concerned about buying this, though, it works great so far.

Pros: Well constructed, nice looking board. Good feature set for the price. On-board clear CMOS button is nice, post led with error codes is useful.

Cons: Over clocking on this board is dodgy at best. I have had a difficult time getting my oc settings to stick after shutting off my system. Basically if I want to tweak the CPU multiplier for more than one session of use I need to reset the CMOS. The ram over clocking is even weirder. It will allow me to adjust the speed an various voltage settings but not the individual timings. They will revert to defaults if I even page through the bios let alone reboot.

Other Thoughts: I bought this with the idea of getting a little deeper into oc'ing with an i5 and some ddr3 2400 ram but this board while not awful has not proved particularly accessible for that

Pros: Two reviews down, I have a 3 star review about the board being DOA. In fact I was so unlucky, the replacement I received was DOA as well! Anyways, thirds times a charm and the third board works great. Thanks to Newegg for 5-day RMA total time from being shipped to Newegg facility and new part at my door. Anyways, about the board. It looks extremely cool, as stated in previous review it fits perfectly with the Phantom 410. It looks great, performs great, and has many awesome features.

Cons: The only con I have with this board is the OC'ing features. Keep in mind, this is my first build and first time overclocking so I'm by no means an expert. I was researching overclocking and I noticed that this BIOS has no maximum CPU ratio, you can only set it to fixed ratio or change the Intel turbo boost. Asus motherboards do have this feature so i do feel the need to dock an egg for that.

Other Thoughts: The orange sata cables as shown in the product images are not orange, they are black (at least for my mobo) Overall a great product Biostar!

Pros: Built my system about 6 months ago and everything is still working fine. The motherboard has excellent bios setups that you can access on start up or from within windows that makes customizing and introduction to overclocking all very nice.

Cons: none

Pros: Excellent build quality and feature set. Built new system, booted up and flashed new bios via "F12" at POST. Recognized my corsair XMS 4x4GB @ 1600. Easy overclock of i5 from 3.4 to 4.4 on stock cooler. Nice BIOS menus. Plenty of ports. Nice they give you the two SLI connectors and other interface goodies. I like to try different brands, MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte and so on. The Biostar XE4 looked neat and I am very happy with it. Very good value in my opinion.

Cons: For my use (gaming) in a HAF922 case, there are no cons to list.

Other Thoughts: Very stable. I recommend this board to those of you who like me don't feel obligated to stick to other brands.

Pros: -Orange/Black themed fits perfect with Phantom 410
-Two Pci-E 3.0
-Supposedly great overclocking features

Cons: DOA. Got everything set up in the case and tried to turn on for the first time, nothing. No post, no debug LED, and no matter how I arranged parts there was no beep. Thats too bad I have to wait 2 more weeks after already waiting 2 months to build this computer. I only took off two eggs because it is completely random that I get a bad board, it looks awesome and has features of a 180$ board.

Other Thoughts: Looks great and supposedly performs great, too bad mine came DOA.