GIGABYTE GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: A hint for faster boot up in final comments and "cons" should you have issues

I bought two of these for two identical builds. I build about one computer a month for family/friends and have been doing so for 20 years.

I was concerned over the negative reviews some folks gave this, but bought it anyway. I also have installed many other gigabyte boards and all are still working to this day. I suspect with quite a few of the negative reviews, the problems are not with bad boards, but with builders lacking the skills needed to get the board to function or diagnose the real issue, i.e. bad ram, ram not seated properly, PSU issues, for starters.

Well layed out board - plenty of room around the CPU socket for after market coolers. Mine function as they should and will buy more when the need arises.

Super duper easy to safely overclock with even for novice users (with right CPU and/or RAM of course)

Came with latest bios.

Cons: I tried to keep in service some older (from 2002-2003) SATA hard drives (Seagate and WD) that I had laying around for extra HDD storage on these builds, bios would always see them, but WIN 7 home premium 64 bit, not so much. It was 50/50. Not sure if this was a MB or OS issue, but had no problems with 2006 and newer HDD's I then used. The old and slow ones met Mr. Sledgehammer.

On behalf of those of us who build computers regularly and pro builders:

Having to read reviews from others complaining that the board doesn't have USB front headers, etc. and docking eggs for that skews the product ratings we rely on. Did you folks not know this stuff when you bought the board?

How about rating the product based on its advertised functionality and possibly your interaction with the manufacturer rather than docking eggs because you thought the manufacturer should have included more options. If you wanted more options, go buy another board - Geez already.

Overall Review: Should you choose to install a gigabyte utlity from the insall disc that has to do with automatically checking for updates to other gigabyte utlities you installed from that disc, you may experience longer boot times - in my case, nearly 60 seconds using a SSD hard drive. Once istalled, you can choose to disable that utility from windows start up, but the delay remains. Once unistalled however, boot ups were fast agaiin.

My core compenents: this MB, Plextor 128GB SSD (love it by the way), Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz, Processor with Intel HD Graphics 3000, G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBXL, OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W Modular High Performance PSU, COOLER MASTER Vortex Plus RR-VTPS-28PK-R1 92mm Long life sleeve CPU Cooler, Win & home premium 64 bit.

From power on to all apps, anti virus, etc. fully loaded - 15 seconds. Handles video/photo editing just fine. I'm using integrated graphics and things look great.

Pros: Great feature set; Crossfire/SLI with 8x on each slot

Cons: Bad BIOS version F10?

Overall Review: I had this board for almost a year, before I finally got around to using it. I had the board rev 1.0, which NewEgg might not be selling anymore. Anyways, I installed Windows and was up and running great! I then noticed there was a new F10 BIOS, so updated it. Things still were fine. I then added two cards in crossfire, and things got weird. I had BSODs, drivers were not being found for USB 3 (even though they were installed properly before) and the Intel Management Engine Interface (MEI) was not starting (exclamation point in device manager). I tried fresh windows install, on-board graphics, reinstalled Intel MEI, etc. but still had flaky operation. I then remember the BIOS update to F10, and noticed that the description mentions MEI. I downgrade to F9 BIOS, and just like that, no problems! Cards in crossfire, running Furmark at 100% per card with Prime95 running on all four cores of i5-2500k. Whew, finally! Just not sure what that F10 bios was doing to me, but be warned.