Intel BOXDX79SI LGA 2011 Intel X79 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: All of these pros are assuming you flashed the most recent BIOS; see my CONS section for that particular rant... The auto-overclock options are handy, although a bit heavy-handed on the voltage. But it was nice to set the 1.25x strap at 4.5Ghz and watch the box go "Ok, got it... Done." I then went in and backed out a bunch of voltage, but it was effortless.

The "Save this BIOS profile" piece is really nice for testing various aspects of your overclock. The Back-To-BIOS button also saved me a few times. The BIOS options are plentiful, albeit it not easy / intuitive to find or manipulate. According to reviews, at basically any speed, this board is probably the most power efficient X79 board available. I've been able to validate that with my own Kill-A-Watt device.

Overall, I'm now pleased with the purchase, although I didn't start that way...

Cons: I was this close -> <- to lighting this board on fire, hurling it from my 3rd floor man-cave window, and then going downstairs to stomp out the flames before it burns my wifes flowergarden down. Changing all the overclock settings to use a static 33x multipler (up from stock 32x) would result in an immediate Windows boot freeze regardless of any voltage or other clock setting. Configuring SpeedStep to only report the High Performance profile and disabling all other sleep states yielded a permanent and unmovable 12x multiplier. Any BCLK that wasn't exactly 100Mhz would freeze the box.

Turns out that the stock October-somethingish 2011 firmware was to blame. Intel released an 0430 version in mid-February that finally solved this disaster. I am quite certain numerous people sent back this board because of how terrible their out-of-box experience must have been.

New firmware is still slow, ugly, and unintuitive. There are GOBS of options, but you wouldn't know by just looking..

Overall Review: The board isn't bad looking, but the skull theme may not work for everyone. It's a no-frills board, so a few people will not be happy with the lack of ports on the back panel. Reviews suggest it isn't the best overclocker, but my 3930k is doing 4.5Ghz on air with the 1.25x strap at 1.300v and mid-vDroop correction. Also, as should be expected from an X79 board, PCI-E bandwidth is HUGE. I have four SSD's on a hardware RAID card; on my prior X38 a HDD benchmark would actually crash my video card so hard that it BSOD's the Win7 64-bit OS. Now it just shrugs and pumps at 1.8Gbyte/sec benchmark numbers! w00t!

Oh, also: don't overbuy your PSU. My Kill-A-Watt device shows 330 Watts of draw at the wall socket with this thing running IntelBurnTestv2 64-bit at 4.5Ghz / 1.25x strap / 1.3v with 32Gb of ram (eight 4Gb Mushkin sticks), a PCI-E raid card, four SSD's, and BR drive.

You aren't going to need a 1KW power supply unless you're running some sort of quad-SLI 580's or something.

Pros: Bought this board a while ago because at the time it seemed like the best of a lot of world. 8 RAM slots (up to 64GB), an internal USB header, oodles of USB 2.0 ports, and other features had me pretty attracted. Not to mention the Intel brand behind it, which is supposed to be rock solid.

Cons: Only two sata 6Gb ports, 6 sata ports total.

As for the bugs, to get this board to work I had to disable the USB 3.0 ports for a while as I waited for updates to come out. The board simply wasn't as solid as I had expected and that left me feeling pretty disappointed. Now, this board is absolutely adequate, but that simply DOESN'T CUT IT when there are MUCH better boards out there, some of which are cheaper and have similar feature sets.

Overall Review: Getting this board now might be ok, there's been a significant amount of updates to keep it stable, but overall it shouldn't be anyone's first choice.