Pros: Everything you need is on-board. Easy setup, drivers working in xp/vista/windows7 32 bit and 64 bit (I have run all of these in an attempt to figure out my problem, see cons).

Cons: There is one thing that plagued my setup for the last week and drove me absolutely up a wall! Using S/PDIF passthrough for HD playback of x264 movies with an AC3/DTS stream I was getting periodic audio "hiccups". Video playback was never affected. I tried every OS and codec under the sun to no avail. Swapped audio cables 5x. Tried a different receiver. NOTHING would make this problem go away. CPU usage was extremely low @ 20-30% max during playback. After 5 days of wracking my brain, I happened to leave the case cover off and noticed that I wasn't getting any skipping. I put the case cover back on and 2 minutes later the skipping is back. The only difference was obviously temperatures. Turns out that when the Northbridge/GPU was going over 50C, the skipping would occur. Anything under 50C and there is no problem. I cannot find anyone else on any forum that can duplicate this problem which leads me to believe this is a problem with my particular board only.

Overall Review: I have this motherboard in an Apex MI-100 case with 2x120mm fans (one on each side) and a relocated hard drive for optimal temperature control. The computer runs prime95 for 12+ hours at stock clocks with no problems. The only thing keeping this from being a 5 star motherboard for me is the issue described above. Hopefully a replacement yields different results, but this is by far the hardest problem I've ever had to track down. Heat causing only SPDIF streams to occasionally skip? Troubleshooting nightmare.