GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Wish I could give this ~4.8 eggs, some minor issues, but overall great board.

Easy setup, nice layout, rock solid so far. Appreciate easy access to the power button (an extra one right next to the RAM for when you're digging around in your case) and clear CMOS on the back (they made it difficult to accidentally hit this). The LED with error code is always nice when troubleshooting builds.

Like the fact that I could update the BIOS without a floppy by hitting END during POST. It'll read any FAT filesystems (USB drive and/or my FAT32 grub partition) and let you browse for the BIOS bin file. Shipped with F2 BIOS I flashed to F3.

HW RAID features are nice, worked flawlessly in RAID0, Acronis TI saw the RAID array without any issues. The BIOS actually recognizes the array as just another HD, so I am guessing that it will work pretty seamlessly with all backup software. See con, didn't work so well when not in RAID.

Cons: More of a con for the i7 920. The CPU runs pretty hot and even throttles itself at stock speeds when at a constant 100% load due to temp/TDP thresholds. I used the default thermal pad that came with the cooler (probably a poor choice). We'll see if this clears up when I install a better cooler. I know I can turn off these limits in the BIOS, but these features are meant to protect the hardware and I feel better letting them do their job.

Some of the Utility software that came with the board I cannot get to work on Vista x64.

I had issues when using the white SATA connections when I just wanted to hookup drives and not use the RAID features. I had 3 160G old SATA drives all hooked into the white ports, and only 2 were be visible. This might be by design, I'm not sure. It seems that only 1 drive can be visible per pair of white SATA ports...not a problem when using RAID features on these ports, could be if you just want 10 independant SATA ports.

Overall Review: I was getting an error code initially (0x69) that resolved to "Turn on L2 Cache". It wasn't obvious to me at first, but I figured out it was my fault due to not reading the manual. If you're running TRI-channel with 3 sticks of RAM, USE THE WHITE SLOTS! If you don't you'll likely get the 0x69 error and it will not post.

Pros: No bugs in the BIOS so far, but I've only used it for two weeks and lots of software has yet to be used on it.
Overall a good design

Cons: If you have a card (my tiny Win-TV card for example) that you want to populate the very small PCI-1 slot with, you can forget about it. The North Bridge heat sink is right behind it and about an inch-and-a-half high so no card can reach the slot unless it is only as long as the slot end distance from the back panel. OUCH! No biggie for me bacuse I did not have all of the PCI-16 slots populated and it went into one of those. But if you had all of those populated this would be a deal-breaker and I would have returned it.

Overall Review: I had to install a sound card in order to capture sound card output. The drivers (or the hardware, I'm not sure which) for the on-board audio do not allow capture of audio output from the system. I am able to do this with my SoundBlaster and have always been able to do that in other systems with any SoundBlaster card.