Pros: Very elegant, simple look -- I really like the black mesh and silver finish. Front panel has audio and mic jacks, plus 2 USB and a FireWire port. Metal construction feels very solid, and power/reset buttons are quality. Plenty of room, too, and circulation is great. Included 120mm exhaust and 80mm intake fans are very quiet.

Cons: A little roundabout to remove the panel from 5.25" bay to install an optical drive.

Overall Review: I like that this doesn't have a case window on the side; it looks more professional in a business setting.

Pros: -- Future-Proofed LGA 2011 Socket -- USB 3.0, SATA III -- Included WiFi + BT card, + tons of included accessories -- Gigabyte website is easy to navigate

Cons: -- UEFI BIOS -- BIOS update utility -- Compatibility + Stability I bought this motherboard for a friend's LGA2011 super-computer, running a Core i7-3930K. Knowing Gigabyte's reputation, I was expecting a MUCH better showing from this board. But we had problems right out of the gate. For the first month we had it running, the system was plagued by hourly crashes in Windows 7 x64. Thankfully, the problem was resolved in version F09 of the BIOS. I can kinda let this pass, since we were early adopters of the LGA2011 platform. But the efiflash BIOS utility was not helpful. It apparently cannot run under Windows 7 x64. Say what?

Overall Review: I also have noticed very strange behavior with boot order. The motherboard gets stuck trying to boot from unbootable devices, like CD drives with no media, or USB sticks without OSes on them. This might be workable, except the BIOS seems to re-order the boot devices when you plug new ones in. We had Windows 7 x64 installed to a 80GB Revodrive (which, as an aside, is also a big disappointment). The BIOS recognized the device easily enough. But despite manually prioritizing the Revodrive in the boot order, the BIOS still attempts to boot from a 2TB documents-only HDD when subsequently added. Lastly, the UEFI BIOS is really clunky and slow. I'd take a simple American Megatrends blue screen any day of the week. I'll give the board 2 eggs simply because it does POST, and we have Windows 7 "running".

Pros: -- Faster than platter-based HDDs

Cons: -- Very poor performance from an SSD -- Small capacity -- Very expensive -- Takes a PCI-E slot I bought the Revodrive for a friend's LGA2011 super-computer running a Core i7-3930K. After salivating over some AnandTech Revodrive reviews, I was expecting a MUCH better showing from this SSD. CrystalDiskMark gave a completely different picture -- even my budget Mushkin Chronos Enhanced trounces the Revodrive. While I do not care *as much* about sequential read/writes, the Revodrive only managed about 55 MBps 4kb random writes. Not very good considering the price tag on this drive.

Overall Review: I've tried a few performance tweaks to get this thing running closer to spec. However, the CDM results did not improve, even with current 1.37 firmware and a SecureErase to reset the NAND. The lackluster results are below. CrystalDiskMark - 5-Pass, 1000MB (All figures in MBps) Seq. R: 283.2 W: 104.6 512K R: 264.4 W: 105.0 4K R: 20.98 W: 60.04 4KQD32 R: 187.7 W: 87.27 Bottom line is -- if you want performance, just buy 2-3 120GB budget SSDs and put them in RAID 0. You'll get 2x the performance and 4x the capacity for the same price.

Pros: Board is small, but well laid-out. Had no issues connecting cables. BIOS detected AMD Sempron 2300 CPU and 2GB DDR2-667 without a hitch. Includes very serviceable VGA and audio, but has 1x PCI-E for upgrades. Also looks great in the case, with a back/red/white color scheme. :-)

Cons: None as yet

Overall Review: I've built two computers with these boards paired with Sempron 2300 processors. They've run rock solid so far.

Pros: The card, being passively cooled, is absolutely silent. Even still, it packs some respectable power. You won't be able to play new games at high settings, but medium is very do-able. The 4550 also tears through older games like Doom 3 and HL2.

Cons: So it won't play Metro 2033 very well! But you knew that already. :-)

Overall Review: As with all mail-in rebates, claiming the offer I had on these was a hassle. I also learned that the MIR can only be applied to a single card per order!

Pros: A 430W power supply will drive most mid-range systems with power to spare. It is certainly more powerful than most of the oddfellow PSUs that are included in computer cases.

Cons: The SATA power connectors are *extremely* brittle. I had to buy two MOLEX-to-SATA adapters to hook up my HDD and DVD drive.

Overall Review: Also, don't count on the mail-in rebate! Thermaltake makes you jump through a LOT of hoops to claim a small amount. They rejected my claim anyway, for being 1 day after a (short) deadline. Even if you do get the rebate, it can only be applied to a single unit.