Pros: This is the second of these boards that I have owned. The first one was in a gaming system that I sold due to being out of work. I had such good luck with that one that I figured, heck, for 79 bucks, buying another one was the way to go.

I have had ZERO issues with these boards. True, there is no USB 3.0 connection for front panel but that's not a deal breaker. The thing is, is that someone will find something wrong with every board out there, and even the best of the best and the most expensive boards arrive DOA, or have some other glitchy issue going on once in a while.

I look at dependability in a system board, and so far these boards don't disappoint as far as I am concerned. I gave it 4 stars for that, along with a pretty ok layout and the ability to use CF or SLI.

Cons: The RAID SATA ports could be mounted a bit differently. The way they are now you either have to have sharp angles on the SATA cables or use the 90 degree ones. Plus plugging cables into those ports is a bit of a hassle because of how they are situated.

One of the 2 CF/SLI slots is only 8x. I removed an egg just for that alone. When I get my new GTX780 (or whatever), I really don't believe that I will be SLI'ing anything, but at the same time it would be nice to have to ports running at 16x, just in case.

Other than that, it's a dependable board in my opinion.

Other Thoughts: Fairly inexpensive for what it is, so that's good. You just cannot beat 79 bones for dependability and "Military Class" components. I put that in quotes because even though the board may contain high-ends capacitors, I believe that term is just for Marketing, but I could be wrong. The thing is though that is where a lot of the problems lie in failing systems boards. It's low-quality caps. After a few years cheap caps tend to pop and then Presto!, you're back to Newegg ordering a replacement.

Pros: The cooler is HUGE. I had no idea it was that big. Anywhoo it seems to cool my FX 8-core really well. It does what it was designed for so that's cool. (No pun intended). :)

Cons: The installation was sort of a clunky affair. The big issue I had with it was the brackets for the AM3+ socket. There is a hole in the center of the sink and a tab that has to be lined up on the recess on the outer edge of the center of the x-bracket, all the while trying to screw it into the posts on the system board. Also, note that even after tightening the post screws down, the sink can still twist slightly on the CPU, but that doesn't seem to affect performance at all.

Other than that it seems to work well. I'm not going to take an egg away though since it cools VERY well.