Pros: It's AM2, AMD 64 Athlon (FX or X2), SLI ready (nForce 570), SATA II and RAID 0 1 0+ 5, DDR2 800, Realtek HD Audio (excellent/24bit), Power BIOS (complete overclocking control), 2 LAN, EZ Boot (restart-hold Esc-change 1st boot device-Bam quick & simple), Two IDE channels (perfect for upgrading from older hardware). Ghost Bios, Thunder Flash, Thunder Probe... so much control over your system... check out Epox's website (you can flash your bios simply from GUI in Windows XP... bypass a tremendous headache of repair install and updating everything over--Really cool!).

Cons: 1. No firewire (Get a $15 firewire card w/ internal header (can send to front panel of your choice)! You need this for transferring from video equipment.) 2. There's two manuals that come with it. It's still pretty straight forward except for including instructions for things not on the board… things that aren't applicable to this model. 3. Bios needed to be flashed right away, initially it's limited (now you can use the Magic Flash utility... so cool).

Overall Review: I’ve had this almost 6 months. This board is well-designed and packed with powerful features. The two IDE channels is definitely worth mentioning. For upgrading from older hardware, get it up and running first. I'm using my IDE devices for now... I used my master hardrive and a slave CD-rom drive on the working IDE channel to do a repair installation of XP Pro (best details at about.com) so I didn’t lose info. Once logged on, install drivers (epox cd), update everything. Then, return to BIOS to enable the 2 eSATA and OTHER IDE channel... from the epox cd you are shown the driver needed (jmicron 36x raid bla bla) so enable all jmicron things in the BIOS. Restart, windows asks for driver, use epox cd. Now, you can use both IDE channels. Also, with the power BIOS, I was able to switch the DIMM Voltage to 2.0 V right away to use RAM that is normally at 2.0 V. No problems at all. So apparently the options for RAM aren’t as limited as previously thought. I used G.Skill DDR2-800.