ASRock Z77 Pro4 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: There is alot to talk about - this is where price meets performance
o 8 SATA ports 4 SATA 3 and 4 SATA 2 !
o 8 USB 2 3.0 6 2.0 (remember your external hard drive really isnt going to be limited too much by 2.0 so dont sweat not having more than 2 3.0 which I dont see too many people needing more than 2)
o Is smaller without sacrificing any sturdiness, i have a heavy CPU heatsink and an older (heavy) geforce 295 with no issues
o A high performance board with most all of the features of more expensive boards (note that the primary sacrifice here is dual pci express 3.0 slots... however If you arent going to do an SLI/Crossfire you probably shouldnt pay for something you dont want).
o the bios will be great if you have been intimidated in the past about overclocking, (personally that was part of the fun, rooting through and manually overclocking) but that aside, this is overclocking on E.Z. mode.
o has an HDMI/DVI/VGA outputs if you want to use onboard graphics with your processor

Cons: *note that this is nitpicky
o Only comes with 2 SATA cables,

Overall Review: This s a great board for the cost, it booted up without a hitch, did a quick memory clock change to 2133, loaded a fresh copy of windows and havent had any issues, my mushkin 240gb SSD took off without a hitch at SATA 6.0Gb speeds, (previously i had it on my SATA 3.0Gb, i honestly didnt expect it to get much faster than what it was (which was monumentaly faster than my 7200rpm drive))

o The bottom line is dont buy a more expensive board unless you KNOW you are going to run dual video cards, i always get SLI capable boards, and i never ever bother to get 2 cards, hell i have a geforce 295 and i cant justify upgrading it yet because it is still doing just fine in battlefield 3 or anything else. This board has alot for the price, please dont overlook it because its cheap, i know i used to do that, my last board was 300, and although i got alot of mileage out of it (and now its still kicking in my loaner compy) but this board should go the distance for 1/3 the cost

Pros: Did almost everything I wanted it to do properly, never had any major issues.

Cons: However, I got bizarre periodic lag spikes for some reason, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why since no one else on my network was getting them. Eventually I replaced the motherboard and I've not had the same issue since. It's a minor thing, because I could've just gotten a separate NIC, but it's irritating just the same.

Overall Review: In the end, I've had much better experiences with equivalently priced Asus motherboards, and I'm not seeing any particular reason to not just buy Asus every time. At the time, This motherboard beat my other options by $10 or so, but it just wasn't worth it.