Pros: Entire upgrade from Atlon 64 3200 took less than 5 minutes. Coming from a single core CPU made this upgrade meaningful. Faster response, much faster when multitasking. Cost benefit ratio of this upgrade made it a must. I will use this for awile until DDR3 and Intel Quad core makes it a must have for the price. That should be in about a year from now.

Cons: I do not recommend this CPU for anyone building a new system. Socket 939 has gone the way of the dinasaur and Intel Socket 775 and AMD socket AM2 will give you better upgradability. There is no place to go from the Athlon x2 4200, not saying that it isn't one heck of a machine. Fast and rock solid.

Overall Review: If I were building from scratch right now I would go with a socket 775 motherboard with the Intel P35 Northbridge chipset. That combo can take and is ready for the new Intel Penryn quad core 45 NM architecture. Very low power, quad core, that will be priced to sell. That with DDR3 memory and you have the fastest and most efficient machine out there.

Pros: Very Fine board and runs great after Fixes. I experienced problems with 2 GB X 4 DDR2 memory. I ran a bios upgrade and that fixed that problem. I am running 8 gb now fine. Next. It initionally kept loosing all USB ports, even on the case as well as the on the board. They just stopped functioning. I diagnosed the problem as a USB driver problem. I had a card called Buslink, a cheap PCI card with 5 USB inputs. I installed that card with the software which added the Usb 2.0 controller software that it needed. Problem disappeared. The boards USB ports now worked and so did the case USB ports. Everything solved.

Cons: Cons, I have none. I use this board each and every day and have never seen a blue screen after the bios upgrade and the USB controller problem fix, during my first week of ownership.

Overall Review: I use this board with an Intel retail boxed 3.0 ghtz dual core CPU and 8 gb of memory. It flies. Highly reliable and exrtreemely dependable. I highly recommend this board, it runs cool and it is first rate. Also, I might add I run windows XP with latest upgrades installed.