Pros: Very nice motherboard overall. Not too much to mention here: good BIOS layout/options, good clean power, connectors on the mobo were all in good spots (although the SATA ones could have been moved a bit, see below). Whoever thought up the Q-Connectors should win the Nobel prize.

Cons: If you plan on SLI-ing, you need to find at least one single-slot card, or one with a double slot cooler that isn't very tall at all. With only one slot between your cards many double-slot coolers would be touching your other card or at least have a lot of blocked airflow. Also depending on the size of your card it may block some of your SATA connectors.

Overall Review: I put in a 45nm E8500 Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz and it didn't detect my clock multiplier properly out of the box, but at least it booted unlike a lot of other boards when you put in one of these new processors. It was very simple in the BIOS to manually set my muliplier to 9.5 where it belongs, but it's just something to look for when you put one of these together.

Comments: This item could be good, but it has a really badly written driver (I also downloaded the reference driver from MosChip (the maker of the chip it uses)). It seems like it resets the USB bus about once every 30 minutes, and makes everything disappear and get redetected (ie. my USB hard drive and anything else plugged into USB). When it resets the bus, if you are printing it disrupts the printer and you have to reprint your document. Also, if I am using files on my external HD (like watching a movie), it drops it and I have to reopen it and seek to where I was, and before I turned off AutoRun it would pop up and scan the drive to determine what AutoRun option it should do.

Pros: Been running this HD for over 10 years, still going strong.

Cons: Maxtor got bought out years ago, no longer available in this quality level.

Pros: Excellent build quality, fit and feel. Good audio after tweaking the EQ, by default it is hollow sounding.

Cons: Buggy (probably just a bad driver for the USB sound card/mixer, but could be hardware). After a week or so of being on you'll often find that, a) The rear speakers have stopped working, or b) You'll get a lot of noise in playing audio (kind of like a ground loop noise). You can fix it by unplugging the USB and plugging it back in, which is a big pain for me since it's plugged in to the back of the PC. Problem (b) you can sometimes fix by swapping the system samplerate from 44.1 to 48kHz (or vice versa).

Overall Review: Needs a better driver for the USB soundcard/mixer.

Pros: This is a really nice backplane that I use for RAID-5 at home. It looks and works nice.

Cons: Mainly a warning for people with kids (or adults with childlike fascination): cover up those flashing lit up power buttons. Lucky for me they only pushed one of them, so the array just rebuilt. If someone pushes more than one you're going to have a bad day.

Overall Review: The power connection is a bit difficult, but not too bad.

Pros: I'm using an Asus P5N-D with E8500 Core 2 Duo and XP x64. Installed RAM with no issues whatsoever, great stuff. I haven't tried playing with the RAM timings yet, but I doubt there will be any problems. The heat spreaders are nice, quality metal without being too gaudy.

Cons: N/A