Pros: This board has very good overclocking controls. Worked with both a Highpoint SAS and an Adaptec card while two versions of z77 Gigabyte motherboards would not.

Cons: The usb ports for the mouse and keyboard do not both work at the BIOS level and then later at the O.S. level. You can have one condition or the other but not both. So, I used a ps2 keyboard and I could work in the BIOS and Windows.

Overall Review: I was a Gigabyte loyal customer for many years until this SAS problem arose with their z77 boards. The Gigabyte boards never gave me the keyboard and mouse problem but I need the SAS to work, so I tried the ASRock after reading many reviews. I purchased four more of these boards to keep as spares since I can get around the keyboard problem. I also had two Gigabyte z68 boards go bad after about 1 1/2 years of 24/7 operation so I will see if these are more durable.

Pros: Overclocking seems to work good.

Cons: Will not support booting from the SAS card unless you press a key to "mount" the bootable media.

Overall Review: I purchased this card after the Z77x version would not support the card and now this Z77 card will not either. The older Z68 board would plug-and-play wonderful with the card and was on High Point's list of compatible boards but you cannot buy them anymore, although I think the auction sites would have older boards still for sale. I may try that since the poor overclocking of the z68 boards does not matter so much to me. I do this for a living and it is taking way too much client time to deal with this and not be able to bill the client for all of this stupid research time.

Pros: These are as fast as my Hitachi 15k SAS drives in read and write. The 15k's are only faster at random read and write.

Cons: No cons that I can see except the increased price over another popular brand for the same size drive.

Overall Review: I have these on an Adaptec 6405e in RAID 1 on seven workstations and cannot get over how they are sometimes faster in read and write than my Hitachi 15k's in RAID 1. However, my SAS Hitachi's are twice as fast at random read and writes with their higher disc speeds.

Pros: Works like a serial card should. Just plug and play and load the drivers.

Cons: None. We are using this run door security software that needs a serial port and it works just fine.

Overall Review: I was already using the first com port on the Gigabye motherboard and needed a second port for the door security. That motherboard has two old pci slots so I was actually able to use one of them!

Pros: The genuine Adaptec cables are difficult to locate and this works just as well after I used both brands.

Cons: None really, but this unit does not have the activity cable to put in backplanes and the Adaptec does.

Overall Review: I am glad these are much easier to locate. However, it took quite a bit of research to make sure they would work with the Adaptec 6405e controller with SAS 15k drives.

Pros: Lets me overclock my I7-3770k to 4.5. It is very quiet to me at 1,800 r.p.m. I agree with the many reviewers that this is just a great air cooler to use, especially for the price.

Cons: Labor intensive to setup. Fan gets in the way of tall memory as many reviewers have said.

Overall Review: I just had to install my fan pulling air rather than pushing in order clear the Corsair Dominator memory chips in all four banks. However, the cooler still works good. My ASRock motherboard and I7 just would not boot at 4.6ghz but at 4.5 the temps were under 90 still with my fan situation. I lowered the oc to 4.4 and the temps are under 80, and mostly under 70 when under load but will hit the 70s for a second then go back down. My idle temps are in the 30's so no great improvement over the stock cooler there. However, the stock cooler was worrying me past 4.2 and even at 4.2 so the new cooler is an improvement over the stock cooler for sure.