Pros: Intel finally jumped to the almighty sandforce controller, but rather than being reckless like other manufacturers by taking the plunge immediately; Intel, instead, took a YEAR of testing and validation before finally producing this marvelous product with a 5 year warranty. I have seen the insane amounts of failure rates of SSD's which scared me from wanting to spend the cash on one. Now that Intel has the sandforce controller I have finally bought an SSD that I know will not fail. You know a manufacturer is confident in their product if they offer a 5 year warranty!

Cons: No cons!!

Pros: None

Cons: Board goes into shut down and start up loop continuously, and does not show anything on the screen. Not even clrearing CMOS fixed the issue. I suppose it could be my i7 3820 not supported, but an unsupported processor should still allow the BIOS to work, else how can you update the BIOS then?

Pros: No plastic garbage components (fans are okay to be plastic) to worry about. Fan cooled.

Cons: Fans are low quality one bearing top design with bottom bearing being a sleeve. These fans will not give you enough hours or reliable operation before they start to get LOUD from where the rear sleeve bearing in each of them has gone bust. So I had to change them out with fans that I had to order from an electronics component distributor.

Overall Review: If you want to remove these fans and put in high quality ones, then use Orion OD4010-12HB fans. These fans are double ball bearing, produce only 25dB of noise, and are guaranteed for 60,000 hours of operation at 45C!!!. You'll have to unsolder the connectors from the original fans and put them onto the new fans. Newegg probably carries 40mm fans of similar quality also. I have not searched to see. I just wished the manufacturer would have gone with these fans in the first place. Yeah, it would have raised the price to an extra $20 possibly for this product, but at least I know that extra $20 gave me some piece of mind that I bought a bullet proof product that will last me many years.

Pros: No lag with flash when using USB devices, and all USB ports show clean signals on my Oscilloscope (Rigol DS2302A) compared to the previous motherboard I had from a different manufacturer that I will not name here.

Cons: I wished motherboard manufacturers would put surface mount devices that are metric size 1608 or smaller, into the inner layers of the board to cut down on DOA issues because it takes very little force for one of these devices to come off the board. A shake can be enough to do it. They already have 8- PCB board layers sandwiched together to make one board and there are traces running along these inner layers. I guess the cost of routing out the space in the inner layers for the very small size surface mount devices would make motherboards to cost prohibitive to sell...

Overall Review: Hopefully, the BGA solder balls that hold on the X79 chipset will not loosen up as they did on my other motherboard from a different manufacturer. I'll update to 5 stars after three years of thermal cycling from running my PC as a BONIC rig (lots of heat and cool down periods).

Pros: Only mATX board for 2011 socket.

Cons: Starting getting Windows blue screen crashes on USB ports and ports not functioning sometimes. Also did a complete Windows re-install because of the craziness with USB ports and flash player causing major system load for some odd reason when getting internet through USB wireless adapter. The windows re-install was near impossible to do because the board did not recognize any drive for Windows to install too! Re-install did not solve the issues either. So I put on an O-scope to the USB ports and what do I see? TONS OF ELECTRICAL NOISE. I believe the solder balls under the X79 chipset are coming loose because my board did have this issue until recently and I purchased this board when it first came out. So the thermal cycling has most likely caused solder balls to loosen up, which may also explain why I am seeing tons of electrical noise. ASUS needs to find a way to stop the solder balls from loosening and they need to cool this X79 chipset down WELL. This chip gets super hot!!

Overall Review: If you use a USB wireless adapter and your flash videos are suffering from micro-stuttering, then it is most likely being caused by the X79 south-bridge chip loose solder joints that go the USB ports!! It is not a software fault of Adobe flash. To help overcome this, either disable C600/X79 USB hub controller #1 or number #2 (make sure the one you disable does not have the keyboard and mouse attached). This fixed the flash video micro-stuttering issues and crashing stopped.

Pros: Has no trouble with displaying 2 million picture files that are 1.5 Mb each compared to overpriced NAS units with less CPU horsepower that use weak ARM processors and will lock up if this many files had to show up in a FTP client browser (been there done that!). Stays cold to the touch on the fan cooled heatsink also.

Cons: Could use a better design for the heatsink mounting, but oh well, it is what it is.

Overall Review: Perfect processor for a Freenas8 box that I am using as a security camera data storage in picture snapshot mode.