Pros: Seems well made. Chip-set heat sinks are substantial, well layed out, and well attached. Sturdy back plate supporting the CPU socket which works great to secure after-market cooler w/o damaging the board. Enough overclocking for me. BIOS was a breeze. Moved the BCLK from 133 to 167, turned off "auto-overclocking" and power-stepping stuff and changed nothing else (no voltages) for a 3.34GHz OC of a i7 920. Running sub-30s idle with an after-market air cooler. No reason to go any higher when this is so easy, so safe and already better than the $1K chip. Minimal, simple drivers. There were not "super suites" of useless poorly made software like some motherboards come with. Doesn't have any bells and whistles but bells crack and whistles are annoying. Just a solid board. Every ASUS board I've bought since 10 years ago worked first try and every try since except this one but I blame my cooler not ASUS.

Cons: Only 2 SATA ports facing outward from the face of the board. The other slots are in the plane of the board and it's a real pain to connect them without dismantling everything. Two was enough for me but I don't understand why they can't make these more accessible. The sound output internal connector pins near the bottom of the board interfere with the last PCI slot. A thick card in that slot might interfere with that. The "CHA_FAN2" connector won't power a fan with manual speed control. Maybe this is standard but you'd think it could still power it and then control the speed as a percentage of the manually setting or something.

Overall Review: That back-plate might end up causing shorts because combined with an after-market cooling bracket standard stand-offs might not be sufficient to give the board separation from the case. When I first installed it on standard stand-offs the fans would spin up for a moment and then nothing all while the LEDs on the board were lit up fine. Suspecting a short I got ahold of some extra tall plastic stand-offs and once I got it sitting on those it POSTed first try and hasn't had problems since.

Pros: It's cheap. It works sort of.

Cons: The heavy heat-pipe cooling the bridges is attached to the board by 5 arrow-headed plastic rivets and springs such that the arrows go through the board, can't come back out, and the springs provide the tension to hold the heat pipe on. Out of 5 of these rivets my board came with 4 of them broken off because the plastic rivet heads are thin and very, very cheap and the spring tension is enough to break them. The chipset was running at roughly 120 C due to the poor contact with the heat-pipe. I got it running by locking it down with a twisty-tie which sadly made the thing far more secure than the intact rivets would have.

Overall Review: I contacted MSI support for some extra rivets and first they told me they were doing warehouse inventory and couldn't find out if they had any. They called me back a few days later and stated they didn't have any rivets but if I RMA'd the entire board they'd send me a new one complete with the rivets they don't have. I asked them why they could provide another board with the rivets but not just the rivets. I offered to pay for their shipping. "Sorry we can not provide this for you." Honestly if you can't engineer a way to physically attach something to the board how can I trust your ability to engineer complex circuitry? Cheap junk like this that already more than one person has had break coupled with poor service and all be RMA-ing this all right and this will be the last MSI product I ever purchase even if the price is low. Honestly by the time I get this squared away I'll probably end up paying as much as I would have for a better product in the first place. Lesson learn