Pros: These drives are what WD refers to as an "enterprise" class drive. longer lifespan, quieter and less power consumption. the claim is a 1 million hour life cycle. good luck living that long.

Cons: used in a stripped RAID, the combined sound is a little noisy, but not as loud as some single drives i have had. not really an issue unless you are after a seriously quiet system.

Overall Review: I was suprised at how small the price difference was between these and the standard Caviar drives. and with a million hour life span, you can expect to be swapping these into newer systems for years (at least until solid state drives become cost effective). do the math, these drives are supposed to be good for over 114 YEARS

Pros: great for sadists

Cons: endless problems with extremely limited resources for troubleshooting. virtually no apps, and due to extremely low adoption of this system, don't expect to see many more. companies that were developing seem to have decided to develop for vista instead.

Overall Review: in theory, it is a great os, but the reality is that any problem you encounter will have virtually no resources to help you troubleshoot. if the tech community had embraced it, i would recommend it completely. they did'nt, they won't, so i can't. if you don't believe me, try researching some hypothetical problems you might expect any version of windows to encounter.

Pros: I have built more systems than i can remember, and none went as smoothly as the one i based on this board. an abundance of SATA connectors allows for the use of SATA optical drives while still leaving room for plenty of hard drives in any RAID configuration you desire. more fan headers than i have ever seen on a MOBO. All in all, a very solid entry by ASUS. will run Vista 64bit without any need to update the BIOS. Windows experience index score of 5.6 of a currently possible 5.9 (i got 5.9 across the board except for the CPU, which got the 5.6)

Cons: some of the SATA headers are poorly placed, but the included cables w/ angled connectors deals with that. i have read that this board has trouble with memory settings if set to "AUTO" in the BIOS. I cannot say, as i prefer to set the timings manually. bottom line- not a single complaint from me.

Overall Review: I am running this board with an AMD 64x2 6400+, a single geforce 880 gts, and 4GB(1x4)Crucial Ballistix memory with Vista home premium 64bit for the OS, and i am still amazed at how stable the system is. I installed a copy of Bioshock in order to see how far i could push the system (using a new Dell 21" wide-screen at 1200x1920). Despite every review i have read implying i could not do so, i am running the game at MAX settings with 1200x1920 resolution and it is running flawlessly. if you go with this board, i strongly suggest using only SATA drives, including CD/DVD, and disabling IDE in the BIOS. i did this and the subsequent performance gain was astounding. So you know, some current optical drives will cause windows to crash during installation, but that is a microsoft issue, and one that is easily patched (best bet is to use an older drive to install, and then upgrade the drive) One more thing, all the results are without any overclocking