MSI X58 Pro-E LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Good documentation, good price for SLI board, very easy overclocking menu, essentially everything.

Cons: None as far as I'm concerned

Overall Review: My setup did not require an SLI bridge to use SLI (which is good because the mobo does not come with one). Make sure you get the proper drivers from nvidia. The first time I downloaded them, I accidentally got the XP 64 bit package and couldn't understand why the nvidia control panel would not open. MSI X58 Pro-E Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.5 GHz 2X EVGA GTX 260 core 216 Cooler Master v8 CPU cooler Corsair 750TX psu Cooler Master Storm Scout Case G.Skill (3x2GB) DDR3 1333 Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

Pros: - Lots of great features - MSI... known for ease of overclocking - 3 USB headers - Nice layout of board in general - I love the easy reference motherboard diagram it came with - Power button on the mboard - nice touch when first getting your system up and running - Led diagnostics on the mboard makes it easy to figure out if something is wrong

Cons: - IOH Heat!!! I saw the negative reviews about the IOH running hot. I thought surely MSI would have fixed this by now.. but nope! Mine ran at 83 celcius out of the box, running idle. That is almost hot enough to cook on. According to MSI forums the best solution is to pull off the heatsink and scrape away bad MSI "gunk", and then re-apply thermal compound. This requires a lot of patience and time, but seems to lowers the temps to 30-40 C. I haven't done that yet, but was able to get a small 50mm fan and stick it on with some aluminum tape I had laying around. This lowered the temps by 10 deg celcius, so now I'm running in the 70's. Still quite hot! Not sure how long this board is going to last me with those kinds of temps but Intel says it's within spec so long as it stays under 100, so maybe I'll be OK. (removed 1 egg) - The SATA connections are on the edge of the motherboard and face 90 degrees. Makes it tough to plug in cables when adding components later.

Overall Review: I've been running MSI boards for years. Have always been happy with the support and quality, and capability for overclocking. Even with the heat issues I'm still glad I bought this board, I think its better than the competition.

Pros: Great mobo for price and perfect for gaming and anything that I can think of. It WILL do SLI!!!

Cons: It will do SLI, but you have to download the BIOS update from msi.com, so don't listen to the others, who say that it can't run SLI, because it can.

Overall Review: MSI x58 chipset mobo 12gb ocz gold DDR3 Nvidia 295gtx i7 920 Antec 900 1tb hard drive 7200rpm 850w Thermaltake Black widow Linksys dualband wifi pci (super fast) *** Crysis all maxed out with 8x AA and no overclocking necessary

Pros: The PCI express ports are nicely spaced out so if you want to put in multiple massive video cards, there is actually room for them. Be warned however that your cheapo PCI express and PCI ports will be blocked.

Cons: Slow-ish to boot

Overall Review: I haven't done any overclocking, nor SLI or Crossfire, so I can't comment on that. My overall experience with this board has been positive however. A couple of people at my work warned against me buying MSI, but it turned out to be a sturdy board. The SATA ports are angled 90 degrees on the lower right side of the board, which is kind of a pain if you have a small case. My cables so straight behind the drive bay holder thingy, folds back over the board and then back again into the drive. I would have preferred if they just came straigh up towards me. Apparently the IOH gets hot. I keep forgetting to check the temp on mine, but I haven't had any BSOD or crashes, and my system temperature otherwise is just fine.

Pros: It does everything I could ask for a motherboard to do. Has allowed me to run my i7-920 at 4.2GHz at 1.3V. It has more than enough settings for adjusting CPU/RAM. My RAM (OCZ Gold and Corsair XMS3), though one stick sits partially under my heat sink's edge, fits fine here. The A0 slot is the second one from the cpu, and probably won't be covered by any heat sink, so if you're only installing 3 sticks of ram or fewer, you almost certainly won't have problems fitting things there. I've got all six slots filled without issue.

Cons: -The lowest PCI slot is very close to the header pins for the front-panel audio, and I could not get an old capture-card to fit in that PCI slot because of this (the back of one of the connector components on the card's board bumped into the audio header pins). -When a 2-port-tall graphics card is mounted in the lower PCI-E slot, the upper PCI slot is covered and unavailable. -Also, there is a problem which is partly the case's fault, and partly the motherboard's fault. With an Antec 902 case, the front-panel power/reset-button header wire is not long enough to be routed behind the motherboard and still reach the pins on the motherboard. These pins are at the bottom right of the board, if you are looking at the board with the CPU and ram toward the "top". This wire must go in front of the motherboard, but the side panel door can cover it up, if aesthetics are your concern. -The IOH chip gets weirdly hot, but mounting an 80mm fan to it fixes that entirely. -SATA ports cramped.

Overall Review: It was a great bargain, and once I figured out where to route all the wires, everything has been fine. The PCB on the version I got is dark, not brown like the Newegg photos show. "Version 3.1" I have. Some fancier boards allow you to make finer-grained adjustments of voltages/etc. in BIOS, but this board is adequate. I haven't had trouble getting my system stable. I had to send my OCZ Gold RAM back to OCZ twice before getting a set which worked 100%. Those sticks do not read properly into this motherboard (even the ones now which are functioning well)... I've had to manually configure voltage/timing for all of the OCZ RAM (but not the Corsair)... there may be an incompatibility problem.

Pros: * Easy instructions * Mounted, plugged everything in, turned the power on, it all worked. * Enough said!

Cons: * None that I can think of

Pros: Have always used Intel boards but got disappointed at their latest x58 features. After reading numerous tech reviews I decided to go with this MSI board. I have never been an overclocker, so I didn't need the features of the more expensive boards. This one has a great layout with more features than I'll probably ever use at a pretty decent price. One of the few I could find with 3 internal USB headers. Installed without a hitch and it even booted right into windows. I didn't even need a fresh install, just installed the driver disc to get LAN, etc. up and running and has been running stable with no problems. Also came with both SLI and Crossfire bridges.

Cons: No complaints, meets expectations.

Overall Review: As stated above I am not into overclocking, but I thought I would give it a try for the firts time. Pretty much with the flip of a switch I got my i7 920 running at 3.4. After an hour of Prime95 the cpu was reading 80c. Using a Geminii heatsink...too warm for me. Heard about IOH heat issues with these boards, but it pretty much stayed in the 60's...not too bad. I won't get into all these overclocking issues because I don't mess with it; but I will say that those who do, the included software works fine and this seems to be a good board that does overclock easily. So far, pleased with my switch from Intel. Sorry Intel, but start listening to your customers about layout and features.

Pros: Good board layout. Not DOA! If your RAM supports xmp profiles, you can use them. Usual stuff in the box. Really like the locations for everything. Nice handy board clear cmos button! Love the bios options, nice layout. i7's Turbo work's nicely.

Cons: Knocked off an egg for lack of an SLI bridge. Seriously? Yes I understand there are supposed to be two versions of the board (msi forums), but the box outside shows both logos. Two dollar part guys. Maybe three if you used the fancy flexible ones. Also contributing to that loss of the egg is the very high northbridge temps. Bordering on 80c, pretty warm guys. Gonna have to pop that off and see if the thermal compound needs reapplying with some other compound.

Overall Review: 16x/16x/4x gonna have to see some SLI action soon! Nice board for the price, better if you don't mind messing with it to fix some heat issues.