Pros: Supports Intel SRT SSD caching which is pretty great. Tons of SATA ports for lots of hard drives. The bios gives you a lot of control.

Cons: It would have been nice to have a on board vga / dvi port rather than just a HDMI ... but hey you have a plethora of pci ports you can plugin a card into so not a big deal. Check your CPU specs if your planning on running a ECC ram. Just because it's a Xeon doesn't mean it's supported.

Overall Review: On board raid allow for the 4 SATAII port to be RAIDed 0,1,5,10 for file storage. The SATA3 is real meant to be used as the OS RAID/ Intel SRT with a SSD i believe. You could probably RAID the 2 (raidable) SATA3 port and SATAII ports together but I'm not sure why you would want to unless you like really big partitions that run at SATAII speeds. I built this with a i5 3570k processor and non EEC ram with no issues. It's seems real set up to server as a home server for and entertainment system but can work well for other uses.