BIOSTAR A880GZ AM3+ AMD 880G HDMI SATA 6Gb/s Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Small, fast boot, looks great

Cons: Big video cards can cover up one of the sata ports and pci slots

Other Thoughts: Bought for a small private minecraft server build. Runs quick and quiet while being very stable. No problems so far. Very easy setup.

Pros: Dern' thing works. And supports 16GB ram (specs on newegg state otherwise).
Onboard graphics support dual-link DVI, drives a 30" monitor just fine (but probably terrible for gaming)

Cons: I have two SSD's and a DVD drive. During active SSD use, the DVD drive wakes up and starts to make noise. Really annoying, but I have not yet decided this is 100% the board's fault.

Pros: Good, does it is supposed to do. I have a Phenom 965 BE CPU and it's working really good.

Cons: The 24-pin connector was very hard to plug in, that is about it.

Other Thoughts: Best video chipset you can get integrated, so go with this one.

Pros: -High quality construction
-Contrary to the pictures, it has ALL solid-state caps
-Came well packaged with anti-static and foam
-Boots quickly
-Simply Bios
-Works out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04 Server 64bit

Cons: -Did not initially play well with Western Digital Red 2TB.

Other Thoughts: In order to get the WD Red 2TB to work, I had to format the drives with a GRUB partition in the beginning. MBR seems to be the only option with this board at this time. GPT did not work for me. And again, this board has ALL SOLID STATE CAPS. That was such a pleasant surprise!

Pros: 4 sata3 ports
Nice bios
Great price

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: This is my third Biostar board, and I've really been impressed with them. This is the only mid-grade AM3+ Micro-ATX I could find, which is the real reason I picked it up, but I really think this is a great board. Easy to put together, and running solid.

Pros: Simple to install. It came up with no issue. I have now installed three of these. One was thought to be a problem and was swapped but the problem turned out to be another component so this one will likely be turned into a system at some point.

Cons: the front panel connector pins are a bit of a annoyance to get to. Still this normally only has to be done once.

Other Thoughts: If you just need a "plain" system, this offers it with the built in display and sound. Don't expect it to be a high end game machine.

Pros: intsalled easily not problems on boot up runs great, good mobo for the price, supports a whole slew of cpus

Cons: i personally prefer to attach mobo's with plastic standoffs,not metal screws, no hardware(screws etc)

Pros: Easy to configure, no problems setting up.

Cons: Burned out on second use, after 10 minutes of operation.

Other Thoughts: Very disappointing. Money wasted, shipping wasted. Problem appears to come from failed on-board voltage regulation. Processor shut down on overheating. Processor, lucky for NewEgg, was not damaged beyond premature aging caused by overheating.

Pros: -cheap price wise
-does what it need to do
-great so far for gaming

Cons: -wish it had 1 more PCIe slot but i knew that before hand so wont knock an egg

Other Thoughts: dont listen to mikey down below. he probably just got a defective board or a defective vid card because my board is running amazing with my XFX Radeon 7870 core edition which i also got from here.

Pros: - not DOA
- bought in a NewEgg bundle, so was quite inexpensive

Cons: - front headphone/mic header is on the BACK of the board
- on-board chip offers DD 5.1 sound, but mobo contains only analog L/R out (native surround sound can be acessed only via HDMI out)
- board contains a digital SPDIF header but no output jack
- UEFI 2.1 firmware can't launch EFI shell v2 and won't accept efibootmgr commands

Other Thoughts: With the exception of the firmware comment, all of the other cons listed are mere inconviniences. The real trouble is the firmware. This is my first mobo with UEFI firmware, and coupled with a 1TB HDD, I was looking forward to using GPT and UEFI's supposedly faster boot options. So I booted an Arch Linux install media in UEFI mode, partitioned using GPT, installed the OS, and then tried to modify the firmware boot loader. That's where the trouble began.

As the Arch installation guide notes, the efibootmgr command might silently fail on some systems. This is one of them. No problem, however, as one can simply launch an EFI shell and modify the NVVARS from there. But wait! The bcfg command needed to modify the boot loader only exists in shell v2, and shell v2 is only supported in UEFI firmware versions 2.3 and later! Therefore, there's no way to modify firmware boot parameters.

However, since the system was able to boot the Arch installation media in UEFI mode (/sys/firmware/efi/vars was populated), I'm guessing it performs some sort of search, or looks for a kernel with a set name in a set location. I need to experiment with this more. Even if this is true, however, it means that the firmware can boot only one kernel. The Arch guide to installing and booting into rEFInd didn't work.

So far I've been restricted to using MBR and GRUB, running only a skeletal system, hoping I can get this to work one day and repartition. I also have yet to try the new Debian installer that ships with Wheezy. I'm hoping it might work better than the Arch efibootmgr.

I'm guessing such problems would be eliminated with a 2.3.x firmware update, but so far BIOSTAR has yet to release such an update for this board. I'll edit this post if I get anything to work.