ASRock H61M-DGS LGA 1155 Intel H61 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Always enjoy buying ASRock boards at the low-midrange, their BIOS, features, quality are all great for the price. At this price point it doesn't really get much better.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: Core of my new HTPC.

Pros: Works with i3-3225 Ivy Bridge processor out of the box without a BIOS update. Runs 1600MHZ RAM! Rare to see that on H61 at this price. In addition to the CPU fan header, it also has two additional fan headers. Good placement of everything. Perfect for a basic build.

Cons: EUFI fan control doesn't work. Tried reducing the speed of my 3-pin 92mm front fan and it didnt matter which settings i used, it was still at full speed. Wish it had HDMI or DisplayPort, but usually you would have to pay a bit more for that feature.

Overall Review: Remember, you get what you pay for. DO your research. H61 is an older chipset with no SATA 6Gbps ports. NO USB3 found here either. If you want these features, look for Z87 or at least something newer than 6 series.

Pros: Inexpensive, reliable, solid

Cons: None

Overall Review: I've been using a lot of ASRock boards lately and I continue to be impressed with this latest board. It's basic but, it worked great out of the box. ASRock used quality Japanese capacitors on this board, (CPU gets solid state even) which should make it last longer. If ASRock can keep this up, Gigabyte and Asus will be in trouble.

Pros: I bought 4 of these motherboards. All worked extremely well, and have had no hiccups even after a year. All 4 meshed with the Intel G540 CPU just dandy. Highly Recommended.

Cons: Color scheme is a bit ugly, but it doesn't matter because its cheap and awesome.

Overall Review: None.

Pros: Have used for about 4 months and haven't had any real issues

Cons: the English in the instruction booklet isn't very well translated Also there is some confusion as to weather this board supports pci-e 3.0 or not. apparently it only supports it on ivy bridge but it's not clearly stated any where

Overall Review: it under-clocked my ram by default, however this was easily fixed in the bios by manually setting the correct speed and voltage

Pros: Cheap, works fine. It's one of the smaller Micro ATX form factors, and I like the layout of the board. It comes with 2 SATA cables, which is awesome.

Cons: None. It doesn't have tons of features, but I'm fine with that since it means a lower price.

Overall Review: The two PCI slots correspond to the first and third slots on my case.

Pros: Nice motherboard for low end puters

Cons: The motherboard might just die on you

Overall Review: It's a nice motherboard thought

Pros: Many nice features, like pci-e 3.0 (supposedly) Updating the bios was easy.

Cons: My whole system broke. My integrated graphics froze all the time and I had to unplug my pc to shut it off. Destroyed my gtx 660 (thanks to EVGA that's not a problem) Looks like it fried the ram on the gpu. Constant hard drive corruption and bsod. The motherboard may not have caused all of this, but when I replaced it for an asus brand, all of my problems went away and my integrated graphics worked without issue. My processor seems faster too. Bios updates are rare. Maybe I just got a bad board?

Overall Review: There was finally a new bios update. I'm not sure if it was supposed to fix the problems I was having though because after updating, it corrupted my hard drive and I lost years of 3d models. This motherboard caused me nothing but trouble. Btw, the processor I used was an i5 3570k