GIGABYTE GA-MA790XT-UD4P AM3 DDR3 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Solid board. I mean SOLID! its evident from the moment you open it. Beefy trasnistors light weight yet durable. Astheticly pleasing. Manual was written well, I would have prefered something a little more technical, but for people who would have trouble..the manual was FAB!! All connectors/jumpers/pins are placed well, so chubby clumsy fingers can maneuver in relitivly easy to change stuff..big plus for me. Bios settins are very nice. You overclockers out there Will love how potent this Board is.

Comes with a great inboard soundcard. I canned my XFI. Not that it was too hard to do..Soundblaster really dropped the ball on this series, now I run exclusivly through my onboard audio. No complaints yet. I had to flash the bios and update..comes with something called @BIOS its simple simple simple. Download the bios you want. Click flash...your bios is flashed within minutes RIGHT FROM WINDOWS!! No more making a floppy, crossing fingers, or hitting jumper pins. ITs AWESOME!

Cons: The bopard recognizes my AMD PhenomII 955BE, but it does not run it. You have to flash the bios to version 4f.
No way around it, I got horrible performance and was wondering If I had a bad chip. I got the problem solved, after a little research, I discovered that the chip cameout after the board was made...so they had to make a new bios for it. Well this new bios IS AWESOME!! My machine screams crysis full settings 1080p resolution, 4xAA(no need to go higher at those resolutions) never dropped below 30fps. I avaraged 53fps on the demo/benchmark tester. But I would say 40-45fps is the realistic avarage I noticed when I played and had fraps running. Still smooth, anything over 30 and Im happy. I have a GTX275 and 4gigs OCZ intel Extreme eddition. And aPhenomII955BE running stock 3.2g( I hear they go to 3.6 on this board w/out having to bump up the voltage) nive to be able to get an extra 400mhz free with little to no buildup on your CPU or heat.

Overall Review: Buy this board. Buy it buy it.
Deffinatly know you will have to flash the bios. Its a must, but trustme. @bios is great.

On @bios...remember when you install it, you cant run it from the program folder...you have to click on your start menu and run it from there...it makes an executable that is not visible if you try to manually open the folder from windows explorer...it must be done from the start menu.

Pros: Nice feature set.
Price.
Pretty colors?

Cons: From the beginning, I've gotten "Updating DMI" message when booting. I've had problems with the NIC disappearing after waking from sleep, and when it does show up, it's slow and has to be disabled/enabled in Control Panel before it works right. AHCI is flaky. Using the AMD driver, it boots fine, but restarts show SMART errors on all non-OS HDDs. Very slow boot times using the MS AHCI driver, but no SMART errors. The board is slightly smaller than the ATX standard. This means that the back edge of the board does not reach the last row of standoffs, leaving this back edge hanging free.

Overall Review: I've also experienced a few unexpected shut downs. At first I thought that something had tripped the surge protector, but all my other stuff was still on.