Pros: I ordered this motherboard with an Intel quad processor and 4 2gig micron memory strips. Installed into my old box with a year old power supply. I worked to perfection from the first time I powered it up.

Cons: Would be ideal it it supported more than 2 IDE devices.

Other Thoughts: Some more detailed instructions on how to overclock would have been appreciated. And how about those MSI's clocking and temperature tools updated to work with 64 bit operating systems.

Pros: Has a lot of connections and features for a MATX board. On paper, it met all of my requirements to be my Home Server and Home Theater PC.

Cons: It physically has 6 SATA ports but only 4 show up in bios. This was a required feature for my decision making purposes.

I am going to preface the following cons with the fact I am running Windows Home Server:

There is no HDMI audio even though I installed the latest drivers. This was an important decision making feature. The Dual Core Center does not run after installation.

Other Thoughts: I only gave this board 2 eggs but that is based on running WHS. I am going to build a Windows 7 disk for this system for testing purposes. I will update with another review if Windows 7 shows more favorable results. Also this will help with bios upgrades. I killed the WHS OS when I tried to upgrade the bios. Poor assumption on my part that it would go smoothly.

Pros: Nice layout, well marked (and silk-screened) connectors, once you figure out the labelling of them (the manual doesn't help, with the references pointing you to different pages instead of just telling you what the heck it is....). Good performance. Not OC'ing yet to know how well that will turn out.

Cons: CPU fan adjustments not explained in manual well, but work. Does NOT actively control case fan (just 50%, 75% and 100%). fan a bit noisy. wake from USB DOES work, but you have to go into the wake sub-menu in setup and enable USB wake to make it work (not just at the first level menus). At least with my single color power switch, S1 or S3 sleep/standby does NOT blink the power LED (like every other board I've ever had). I may try the other power led connector (it has 1 in the main block of FP connections, and another elsewhere...).

Other Thoughts: Win 7 did not regocnize all items from the boot disk, (some 'coprocessor' not recognized)...have to fix that once I get it on the net and DL Win 7 drivers.

Pros: Lots of extra goodies. For example, For those looking for higher quality audio output, please RT(F)M. There is an S/PDIF pin connector on the board. You simple have to buy an expansion slot cable hookup and plug it in to the board (see pg 17 of the manual). Works great with the Antec HTPC case, has plenty of pin connector for all the HTPC gizmos (4-pin USB adapter for the LCD/volume knob, etc.)

Cons: No S-video out. Since I don't have an HDTV just yet, I had to buy a $30 card with S-Video for the interim. The manual is a little non-specific about certain points, like which memory slot is DIMM-1, etc., (though if you study the printouts on the board, it's easy enough to figure out.

Other Thoughts: All in all a great board. After sitting down with the pin connector mappings from the manuals from the board and my case, I was up and running in no time.

Pros: Runs Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit - no problem for 6 months now.

Cons: None

Pros: Excellent onboard video! I bought this board off Thebay for 78xx and an old E2140 for 27xx an Open Box: ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro for 12xx so I’m in it cheep. It will overclock the 2140 to about 3ghz but I backed it down to 2.7 - 337x8 to keep the temp down. This board would perfect for a media PC if the features worked right. BUT…

Cons: This Is The Most Irritating Thing For Me!!
It will not resume from S3 any way except with the power button. Yes resume from USB is set in the bios.
It has an option in bios for 512 shared video memories. When you set it there it just goes back to 256 on reboot. It will only let the memory run PC800 auto. If you change the memory settings in any way it won’t boot. I got it to run PC 900 by changing the divider settings but then got random blue screens. I spent extra for cas4 fast memory because all the reviews of this board on the internet said MSI was going to fix the problem with a bios update by the time the board was released. I wasted my money.
The GPU chip gets very HOT. The heat sink is just a flimsy little aluminum piece of junk with a MSI plate on top. I took it off and put Artic Silver on it but it still runs over 70C in normal use. I hate to think how hot it gets when running 3D programs, you can barely touch it.

Other Thoughts: I never got the AHCI drivers to load when installing XP Pro. It could be my fault, I just gave up after 3 try’s.
If the S3 issue were solved I’d be pretty happy with the board for the price I paid. If I was doing it again I’d get a cheep G or P 31 chipset with a mid range video card for the same price you’d pay for this board. MSI should be sued for putting this Not Ready For Primetime thing out then not supporting it. There was one bios update but it didn’t solve any problem that I could tell. Wish I’d bought it at Newegg so I could send it back LOL.

Pros: fantastic video

Cons: No digital audio out

Other Thoughts: Unlike almost all of the gforce 9300 boards, this one is missing digital audio out for the built in audio. Bought this for a HTPC, so I needed to get a cheap soundcard with spdif

Pros: On paper this was a perfect motherboard for my needs, 45nm support, nvidia chipset, HDMI etc. That would be great IF IT WORKED. I bought it to build a computer for my little cousin, and from that moment on, i've had nothing but problems.

Cons: randomly freezes, seems like a memory issue, tried 3 seperate pairs of ram, changed voltage and timing but it still freezes (all 3 purchased from newegg, and tested working from other computers), Called MSI technical support and went straight to voicemail. The MSI forums were helpful, but to a point, i've tried everything they told me and now i'm not even getting a reply from them.

Other Thoughts: if my cousin told me that he was having problems within the first few weeks, i could have just RMA'd it through newegg, but he didn't. now I have to deal with MSI, who's not being helpful and is making my life difficult. this is the first MSI board i've purchased and i don't think i'd buy another, I've stuck with Asus Motherboards usually, and felt that i could trust MSI becuase it was a big company, well i was wrong, and i wont make that mistake again.

Pros: Built in gpu
Handled 4 gigs of ram on first boot no problems
Price
Seems well built

Cons: Only came with 1 sata cable
Only one PCE-I 2.0 slot, but this isnt a board you get if you need that

Other Thoughts: Used this with a Q8200 for an office computer. The onboard gpu works great, and even automatically stays on if you put a crappier designated card in. I put 4 gigs (2x2) of ram in on the first boot and everything loaded fine.

It took me a good 10 minutes before i could get into the bios because it was posting to fast for me to hit del and get in, was going straight to the insert media screen since i had not installed windows yet!

Pros: This mobo has just about everything you could want in an entry to mid-level product. The on-board video is quite capable of playing even the newest games at medium settings and supports DX10. Realtek HD 5.1 audio and Gbit LAN on-board eliminate the need for buying any additional cards. Board supports a plethora of processors. Installation of drivers was very easy and straightforward, requiring only two reboots of the computer in XP.

Cons: System would not POST after initial build. After going through some basic troubleshooting steps (unplugging all cables but power switch, swapping CPU, adding a video card, swapping RAM, etc), still would not POST. The manual and MSI web site had ZERO information on troubleshooting a no video issue. I suspect less tech savvy may have returned the board as DoA. As a last ditch, cleared CMOS, tried booting again, and lo and behold, there was my video!

Other Thoughts: THe board only has on PCie x16 slot and only supports 8GB of RAM. I suppose you really can't expect SLI on this price point board, but for those running XP or Vista 64-bit, supporting more than 8GB of RAM may have been helpful. If it weren't for the no POST issue I came across, I would have given this product a five.

Pros: What can I say? I like this board! The NForce 730 / Geforce 9300 north bridge is a well performing combination with decent graphics performance. You can also use the north bridge as a dedicated PhysX processor if you use aftermarket PCI Express video card, so it's versatile.

I was a little concerned about the passively cooled north bridge but in a Thermaltake Lanbox Lite case with my Core2 Duo E8500 CPU and stock cooler the north bridge idles at around 45C (CPU is at around 35C) and I haven't seen it go above 55C yet, which is reasonable.

The BIOS settings are pretty straight forward and there are some decent overclocking options.

Six SATA ports are a big plus too, even if they're overkill for a mATX motherboard. The board also has integrated 1394 which is surprisingly lacking in the higher-end mATX boards. The integrated 9300 also has HDMI and supports audio over HDMI although I haven't used them.

MSI also included a color-coded back bracket which is a nice touch.

Cons: Six SATA connectors and only one SATA cable? That was a minor annoyance.

The board doesn't support anything higher than DDR800 and there is no SLI, although I think running SLI in a mATX system is totally overkill some people do it.

It would have been nice if MSI included some temperature monitoring software similar to the EasyTune software Gigabyte included with their boards (don't know if they still do). MBM5 crashes at startup so I guess it doesn't support this motherboard but I can still check the north bridge temps through NVMonitor.

Other Thoughts: All in all this is a good motherboard and the price is fine. It's the only one I saw on Newegg with the 730i / 9300 north bridge. I didn't want to get a dedicated card just yet and this setup still handles Fallout 3 on low-medium settings at 1440 resolution (22" widescreen lcd max resolution is 1680x1050), as well as Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts at medium settings and same resolution.

If you're looking for a budget mATX board that is still a strong performer that has room for upgrading in the future then I'd definitely recommend this motherboard. It has all the features I want and ran without hassle on the first boot.

Just remember to get a few extra SATA cables!

Pros: This is a nice little motherboard - fast, HDCP-compliant onboard video, many SATA ports, and generally full-featured. However...

Cons: The one I got had NIC issues - namely, the driver wouldn't install under Vista x64. MSI support told me it was a hardware problem and to RMA the board.

Also, note that this motherboard supports FSB up to 1600, but DOES NOT SUPPORT RAM FASTER THAN 800MHZ! Period. It's actually the 730i chipset.

Other Thoughts: Meh. I wish I'd done more research before I got it.

Pros: Posted and was sure I was in Business, Loaded vista 64, then my 8600GTS, thats when problems began.

Cons: I put pc in sleep mode, my wife got on the puter the next day, it had blue screen of death had to reload vista again and go threw the microsoft watchdogs thinking I'm trying to pirate their OS, wants vista loaded again, then my 8600 GTS, sleep mode option not available, some kind of conflict with nvidia driver, loaded the latest bios, couple days later same thing, had to load vista and go threw the watchdogs @ MS again, after the third reload I was done. I believe MS was causing this hole problem. But I had to RMA this board, its no good if its conflicting with MS watchdog system, and they are allowed legaly to turn off your OS, I paid $300 for vista ultimate 64bit and 32bit retail.

Other Thoughts: I'm wondering how much it costs MS to have these people and all the other costs of trying to prevent people from getting their OS for free,
Don't they know what their putting there customers threw. I mean come on some OS are FREE.

Pros: The on board video can faithfully reproduce 1080p and with the audio over HDMI, you have a HDCP compliant output required for for blu-ray with full fidelity.

Cons: The audio driver in Vista has some issues with the volume level being fixed for 5.1 audio but variable for PCM audio. My solution is to use the TV/Receiver volume instead of controlling the volume from the normal windows volume controls.

Pros: I guess it would make for a good desktop machine.

Cons: The main issue with this board is that the nvidia graphics driver is no good. I have not been able to get any audio over hdmi, stereo or surround. There's also an overscan issue so I can't see several pixels around the edge of the screen. These are both driver issues, though, so hopefully they will be remedied. I have tried the nvidia 180 beta driver to no avail. Also, the board only has one sysfan port, I'd really like to have two.

Other Thoughts: I bought this board to build a mythtv box, I should have done more homework. As far as I can tell you can't get audio over hdmi on nvidia setups using the alc888 audio device. I know that you can get full surround sound with ac3 passthrough over hdmi with the alc883 audio device (just unmute iec958 with alsamixer). Hopefully nvidia will address these issues quickly...or just free up their code and let the open source community handle it.

Pros: I guess it would be fine for a standard desktop machine. It boots up, I can access my two 1.5 terabyte sata hard drives, I can get stereo audio over headphones...

Cons: I can't get audio over HDMI and the picture overscans at 1280x720 (there's a margin of several pixels around the edge of the screen that you can't see). These are problems with the nvidia driver, though, hopefully they'll be remedied. I tried the nvidia 180 beta driver to no avail. Also, there is only one sys fan port on the board, it would be nice to have two.

Other Thoughts: I bought this motherboard for a linux HTPC, I should have done more homework. I know you can do full surround sound passthrough over HDMI on earlier nvidia chips, so I figured I'd get a more advanced chip and be that much further ahead. As far as I can tell you cannot yet get audio over HDMI with the alc888 audio device. I know that you can get surround sound audio over HDMI on those models that have alc883 (make sure to unmute iec958 in alsamixer).