Pros: Peak of current desktop CPU market. Most or all chips seem to be able to get great stability up to at least 4.5 GHz. The die-spreader thermal interface material is known to be solder, leading to more efficient cooling. Using the XSPC Raystorm 750 AX360 (tri-radiator), my temperatures are around 30C at idle and 70C at full load, with maximum core excursions (after several days of full load) around 78C (as recorded by HWMonitor). Cinebench 15 scores are around ~990 at stock and ~1200 at 4.5 GHz.

Cons: Some chips, like mine, seem to require higher voltages for stability. Although an earlier reviewer achieved 4.6 GHz at 1.346V, mine required 1.414 V for stabilty at 4.5 GHz. On the other hand, I am at 1.424 V at 4.5 and have been perfectly stable for almost 2 months, with about 30% of this total time running scientific computations in MATLAB at full load. 1.424V gives stability at near-idle at 4.7 GHz, but crashes on load. I do not have a desire to go higher as I hope that this computer will work reliably for at least a few years.

Overall Review: Those with a lot of money to burn (>4k) and some need for many-/multi-threaded workloads may wish to consider a Xeon based system instead. With xeons you will sacrifice some per-core power for huge bulk power gains if you have it in your budget (~4-6k). But if your budget is huge (>8k) (e.g. consider the E5-2697 v2), you can have the same per-core power (before overclocking the 4960x), but have 2-4 times as many cores to work with. Regardless, the overclockability of the 4960x makes its per-core power virtually unbeatable.

Pros: 28 cores. Easy to 4.4+ GHz all-core with custom water loop. Everyone looking here will know the pros from research.

Cons: The main reason for my review. This board will simply not POST with a slightly older GPU. I had tried a Gigabyte GTX770 and a Sapphire HD 7770 and both failed. Consulting with ASUS, the POST code did not indicate that the GPU was to blame so I RMA'd the board. The same thing happend with the second board, but I coincidentally had ordered an RTX 2080 and it booted right up with the new card. VERY frustrating, but otherwise the board is great.