Pros: I have been an AMD guy since 1995 so this was my first Intel self build. I chose this board because I wanted dual 16x pci-e for crossfire. All I can say is WOW. I dropped a Q6700 into this board and some crucial DDR2 1066 and it flys! Bios is pretty easy to understand. The voltage for the ram was a bit odd. You over volt it .4 to get to 2.20 volts(base with the board is 1.8v it seems). Overclocking went pretty well. This board pulls you out of the fire if you set something wrong. It will go thru about 2-3 reboots and then goes back to the stable settings. No having to pop open the case and fine the Clear Cmos jumper. Normally I am an ASUS fan but frankly Gigabyte seems to make rock solid products as well. I can recommend this board to anyone wanting to save a few bucks over those more expensive intel boards. Does overclock, runs solid, good performer. My rig right now is Q6700, 2 3870x2's in Crossfire, WD Raptor Raid 0, 4gb Crucial DDR2, Xfi Fatalty.

Cons: I'll admit the first board I got had a transister rolling around in the box. Rough shipping or a poor solder. Stuff happens. I did the RMA back to newegg and the second board was perrrrrfect! First board still worked with the tiny tiny transister missing but I wanted a correct board.

Overall Review: Seems like a good board for a light overclocker or beginner Intel builder like myself coming from years of AMD.

Pros: 2 PCI-E x 16 slots. Nice sized heat sinks on the N&S bridges keep the temps low. Had no issues recognizing my Corsair DDR2 1066 memory. Has two on board 100 / 1000 Ethernet adapters for anybody needing a dual homed system. The Realtek audio sounds great! I listen to a lot of music while I do other things on the computer and the sound is a big improvement over my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz in the previous machine. I don't know if it is Vista ( first time using it ) or Realtek but I'm able to adjust the volume on a per app basis rather than by file type. This thing OC's like a champ! Have run my E8500 @ 3.16, 3.6, 3.8, 4.0, and 4.2. I played a few hours online of COD4 at all speeds and never had any issues. The BIOS has the option to auto adjust the voltage for you and it was always stable at the voltage it chose. I would suggest trying a voltage a bit lower than what it sets though ( note on that in Other Thoughts ).

Cons: Only two really. One is the price but I feel you get what you pay for. The second is the placement of the SATA connections. I'm doing 4 SATA drives in a RAID 10 and 2 SATA DVD/CD drives. If you look at the pics of the board, there is a group of 4 SATA connections then 2 by themselves near the IDE connection. If you plan on doing SLI or Crossfire with a larger board such as the Radeon 4870 the card in the second slot will obscure the two connections by the IDE connection. I haven't added a second board yet but I'll pop out my card to be certain it fits before I attempt Crossfire ( may just wait for the X2's instead ). Eyeballing it though it doesn't look like it will fit. At the best the cables are going to have to be bent pretty sharply but it looks like the fan enclosure on the card will hit the plastic end of the SATA cable connector. - The connector and my comments in Other Thoughts are the only reason I didn't give 5 eggs and instead gave it 4.

Overall Review: This is a bit of a con as well but it isn't a big deal. As noted above, you can leave the voltage on auto when OC'ing and the board will adjust according to your speed. After getting my E8500 up to 4.2GHz for a while I went back to stock speeds. Voltage at 4.2GHz was a little over 1.4. Wanting to say 1.42 but it may have been 1.46 ( sorry don't recall exactly ). CPU was a hair hotter than I wanted so I went back to stock speed for a bit just to see if I really could tell a difference in my apps. The temp never came down. So looking at the voltage it remained at the ~ 1.4 setting even though my CPU was clocked back down to 3.16. It would seem the board remembers the last voltage setting and only changes the voltage if a higher voltage is needed. It increased every time I OC'd more but it never came back down. I had to manually set the voltage. If you OC and jumping your speeds around make note that you'll need to set the voltage lower when you step down in spee

Pros: My first build, goodbye dell. The X48 boards looked much more stable than the Compitition from the reveiws. This board oozes stability and is easy to setup and oc for us newbies. This board was made for Vista 64 so why look back, it works like a charm and is fast - highly recommended. I set multiplier at 9, CPU frequency at 400, set mem latency to spec, multiplier to D2.66 in my case so mem runs at spec 1066 and WaLa my E8400 is at 3.6 Ghz stable with Mem timings and voltages kept on auto. Only issue was a high vcore so I manually lowered it to 1.25 vcore. 3.6 ghz seems to be the sweet spot, higher seems to require voltage and timing manipulations that im not comfortbale with - but 3.6 is probably perfect for 24/7. Downloaded updates from Giga's website using a flash drive. Internet wont work until LAN update installed. Very Happy so far

Cons: Not really a con but Giga's manuel insisted that a driver be downloaded for raid config and for my raid0 in vista 64 it was NOT necessary even though the manuel insisted a download be done. Set HDD to raid in bios then loaded Vista, skip download and it goes straight to intel's raid setup. Was easy and no problems. Also CPU and case Fan speeds not registering, not sure why ive got to research it.

Overall Review: Intel E8400 @ 3.6 ghz - 1600fsb - Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4 - OCZ Platinum (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) @ 2.14v One (ATI) 3870 OC @ 840/1180mhz - 2 Seagates 250gb HD in Raid0 - COOLER MASTER GeminII which is large with two 120 fans on top of it. made build more difficult but works well, looks good keeps mem cool and you can install mem after this is installed. Dont cover your pci-e 2 slot. CPU temp stays around 30C to 35C havent tested under real heavy load. 3DMark06 at 11980 Crossfire will bump that considerably

Pros: Excellent board. Very high quality, and everything works out of the gate unlike another manufacturer I'd previously tried. Dual-Bios means that if you blow and overclock it will reset to defaults but save your settings so that you can go back in and tweak. This board has my E8400 (3.0GHz) running at 3.97GHz at pretty low voltages. I've no doubt that if I was willing to juice it I could get 4.2 GHz stable, but I'm somewhat more cautious than some. The ram is running at DDR2 1061, which is pretty impressive I think.

Cons: None really... some of the utilities seem a little pointless, and the little LED bar to indicate workload on the motherboard is just silly..

Overall Review: You won't regret this board. A little pricier than the consumer class boards, but it's luxury all the way. I haven't used the Esata connectors or firewire, and haven't used the onboard sound but it's about as good as you get for that I'm told. No problems with my X-Fi.

Pros: Great brand especially with ASUS losing face as of late. High tweakability, easy build, good utilities, energy efficient. looks good. crossfire in 2x pci express 2.0.Would have gone with a SLI solution but the geforce 700 series has had some bugs that i didn't care messing with.

Cons: The raid setup still requires a floppy which is frustraiting when most FP drives i own are mostly dead or dieing. Instruction tell you to use MSDOS before anything is installed to transfer the raid drivers to the floppy before in the windows install. You need another machine with a floppy drive to transfer the files first then you need the drive on your new pc. this is real fun if you only have one drive and you have to swap it between PCs and your Fdrive is registering on your old failing machine. Gigabyte should have gone with cd or a download or something other than the floppy.

Overall Review: I would give this a 5 if not for the raid setup. good buy if you don't mind spending the extra dough. teamed up with q6600,2x2gb ocz1066ddr2, zalman 110mm heatsink, 2 wd400gb sata2 in RAID 0, and a MSI 3870 OC, SB s-fi pro and it runs crysis on high/ ultra high smoothly without being overclock.

Pros: Feature rich. Supports PCI-E 2.0, 45nm CPUs, etc. Has a great potential.

Cons: The board appears to be defective. I don't want to give it just one egg yet. I will wait for a replacement.

Overall Review: With all components connected, the system keeps rebooting on its own (stays up for a few seconds and then shuts off, and keeps going through the on/off cycle). I isolated everything (PSU, the peripherals), and it appears to be either a problem with the Mobo or the CPU. Statistically, mobos go bad much more often than the CPUs. I will write another review later.

Pros: Solid product offering with plenty of flexibility.

Cons: After market cpu fan choice may be limited. Memory slots are close to the CPU. ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm fan covered the first memory slot. If you want to run the full 8G, check the fan dimensions before you buy.

Pros: Great motherboard for a gaming rig. Or for any rig for that matter. Tons of overclocking options (if you are into that sort of thing). For those of us after something that is guaranteed to work and have high data throughput at the get-go (without overclocking), this board is it. Good layout.

Cons: Getting the F2 BIOS upgrade onto the system prior to an OS install was downright confusing - and I know what I'm doing. Installing Vista 64-bit was painfully slow (partly my fault for not loading the GIGABYTE SATA drivers) but once I installed the motherboard drivers everything became quite snappy. The "Energy Saver" app. crashed frequently and reset my power management settings after I had already set them. The BIOS' English sentences are lacking (obviously someone tried their best but still failed). Vista 64-bit failed to recognize onboard Ethernet until I installed the motherboard drivers on the CD. Don't use GIGABYTE's drivers on the website as they don't work.

Overall Review: This motherboard is ridiculously powerful. It may not be considered "high-end" by most overclockers, but the back panel ports tell me all I need to know. This thing is clearly built to handle serious hardware and abuse. I used this to build my non-overclocked gaming rig - I still have yet to find a game that has to run at less-than-the-absolute-highest settings. Updating to the F2 BIOS was actually easier than GIGABYTE made it out to be - I ended up just copying the BIOS update to a USB thumbdrive, plugged it in, and used the Q-Flash method - the F1 BIOS saw the file on the FAT formatted USB thumbdrive. I had difficulty because the instructions talk about using a floppy disk...I didn't put a 3 1/2" floppy drive in this system (didn't see the need). You can't go wrong with this board. Since I'm using this in a gaming rig, the "Energy Saver" app. was a huge, unnecessary waste of time (crashes, reset settings, etc.) and I ended up uninstalling it.