Pros: Great board with a big improvement over the Lynnfield in disk IO. We run these with LSI 9260 RAID cards and couldn't be happier IO improvements. Also, no problems running Windows or Linux. Though we needed get the latest NIC Drivers from the Intel site and compile them for our CentOS builds.

Cons: Seems like they are hard to get.

Pros: Great solid RAID card with support for all major OS's. I would highly recommend this card for any always up server environment.

Cons: None

Overall Review: You should purchase the battery backup so you can safely enable write back cache.