Pros: Upgraded my motherboard to this from an ASROCK FM2-A55M-E33 in hopes of getting the newer Kaveri APU in the near future. Nice little board with lots of features, the new BIOS is easy to use and everything seems to work once I updated the drivers.

Cons: TThe first motherboard had a dead memory slot so had to RMA it back to newegg. Second one would not post and I thought it was dead. Reseated everything and it came to life, not sure why but think the power plug was not fully in which is hard to do on this board since the last few inches of the board where the power connector goes is not supported by anything and flexes quite a bit when pushing in the plug.

Overall Review: Was nice to get Battlefield 4 with this MB, can't say I like the story line in the game but it's free.

Pros: Small, does not draw much power and does stay under 60 C in a small fanless enclosure (not that I would recommend that you do that). Also pretty cheap.

Cons: Documentation leaves a lot to be desired and there does not appear to be any speed controls for the two system fan connectors so if you're looking for a quite build make sure you have some other way of controlling the fan speed. Also Biostar cheaped out with some of the Capacitors so not sure how long these boards will last. Might want to spend a few bucks more on the Gigabyte board Newegg sells instead as it looks to be a better build quantity. Does not have drivers to support Linux so while I got some distros to start the boot process they all choked when it came time to load graphical drivers. This will probably be fixed by the Linux community sooner or later but may take some time.

Overall Review: OK got this yesterday and spent over 4 frustrating hours trying to get FreeNAS to boot on this thing, tried everything including trying to just get various distro's of Linux to boot just to try and find out what's going on. Lesson learned is that you must set the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) to enable for anything other than windows 8 to boot. Can't say how well this will work with FreeNAS as it is limited to 8GB RAM and does not have ECC support but I'm just playing around with it to learn so don't really care. If you really want to do it right get the ASRock Avoton based boards (they're $200+ more than this one but worth it in my opinion if you're serious about running a real NAS and not some plaything like what I've got).

Pros: The case is a really good looking modern micro-ATX case with space for most things you'd want to do like custom water cooling, etc. Has plenty of places to mount fans and the tempered glass looks really good with a very good release mechanism. very well built over all.

Cons: First and foremost is the restricted air flow through this case. The front mounted fans draw air from the back side panel that goes through the place were most of your cables will be blocking that flow and even with the cables in the way this still doesn't work very well. Because of this expect your rig to run hotter. Also did not like that you had to break off the plastic tabs for cable access, these should have been rubber grommets. The drive bay could have been better designed, as it is you either need to remove the cable shroud or the power supply to get it out or access the 2.5" drive SATA/power connectors.

Overall Review: There are only 4 expansion slots so if you have a board that supports dual graphics cards you can only use one graphics card in this case. Also if mounting a 3.5" drive make sure that you have right angle SATA and power connectors or you'll never get the back panel back on. lastly you need a modular power supply as there is not enough room for all the cables otherwise.

Pros: Upgraded the BIOS and firmware to the most current works like a champ with FreeNAS. The IPMI is great because I have the NAS in a place not easy to get to so can remotely manage most things via the web interface. Uses ECC memory which is recommended for freeNAS an am currently using Crucial CT51272BD160B 4GB low voltage sticks. Uses regular DIMMs rather than the laptop size a lot of these C2550/C2750 motherboards use so more choices and cheaper memory. Tons of SATA ports, 12 overall. Easily saturates my Gigabit LAN when doing data transfers and uses intel based NICs.

Cons: No USB 3 on the back.

Overall Review: Would rather have had an active CPU cooler as the passive one does not cool the CPU very well unless you push a lot of forced air through the enclosure which ends up being louder than a regular CPU heat sink fan.

Pros: Zippy little processor, great graphics that can run mid-level games surprisingly well. Considering that it only uses 95 watts for what amounts to a low/mid end graphics card and a 4 core processor that performs almost as well as a i5 Sandy bridge is pretty impressive. Using 1866 RAM and got 7.4 for the processor and 6.9 for the graphics on the Windows Experience Index. Very good for a HTPC where you want to do more than watch movies with it, good all round performance.

Cons: The price for this is a little too high without the free Battlefield 4 coupon, realistically would say the price point should be around $139.99. Also the CPU cooler is not the greatest but really isn't that bad.

Overall Review: Pain in the neck getting the drivers right, swapped out an A4-5300 for this which is the only way I would have been able to update the BIOS for the motherboard. If you do what I did then make sure you un-install the old drivers before you install the new ones otherwise you won't get the full graphics performance.

Pros: Basically the G530 is a i3-2120T with a few things missing. The few things missing won't make much difference for most people but here they are: 1. No hyper-threading 2. No GPU support for video encoding 3. No GPU support for blu-ray 3D playback 4. Slightly smaller cache (2MB versus 3MB) In every other respect these are the same processor but your paying about 1/3 of what an i3-2120T costs. Also, this is a low power part and if you so desire you could drop the CPU core voltage a little bit to save 1 or 2 watts and have exactly the same power consumption as the i3-2120T. I was a little bit unsure when I bought this about its performance but playing 1080P HD playback is no problem for this puppy, and is quite snappy in standard tasks. This is NOT the Celeron of a few years ago and as a basic low cost CPU for a low end gaming rig this would be ideal or for a HTPC or as a low end home PC. With this I put together a system for under $250 that can handle most things that I want it

Cons: If you're going to use this for an HTPC be aware that as with all Intel Sandy Bridge iGPUs there is still the 24p issues that has yet to be resolved for high def playback.

Overall Review: G530 ASUS P8H61-i motherboard 4 GB DDR3 memory No name itx case 500 GB HDD