Pros: The specs look good on paper.

Cons: The board will not post with a HDMI cable connected.

Overall Review: I paired this board with a i3 2100 and 4GB of ram. This was supposed to replace my existing MythTV frontend. Unfortunately the board will not post when you have a HDMI cable connected. I used an old monitor to get the system installed (Ubuntu 11.10). Once I connected the system to my Denon receiver, it would no longer post. To boot, you need to disconnect the HDMI cable, power the system on, and count to 10. Once the OS has booted you can reconnect the cable and the display works fine. The board came with a very old version of the BIOS, so this problem may have been corrected already but I have not found a way to update the BIOS without installing Windows. The "Live Update" utility in their clickable BIOS just hangs at 0%. This board is going back tomorrow...

Pros: 9 onboard SATA + 1 eSATA. Dual onboard PCI-E Gigabit ethernet.

Cons: With each BIOS update comes a whole host of exciting new bugs. The SATA controllers seem to be very finicky. I went through 8 WD 500GB drives before I found 5 that would coexist at the same time connected to the primary SATA controller. The other 3 would only show up with a maximum of 4 drives on that controller, adding a 5th caused them to stop working. Dual GigE is nice, but the chipset support is very hit or miss under Linux.

Overall Review: I have used this board in three cheap-o fileserver builds, each running Linux. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this board. I have to hold my breath every time I reboot one of these boxes because more often than not they don't come back up without some tinkering in the BIOS or repeated boot attempts. I had pretty decent luck with the first 2 of these boards, but I pushed my luck with the 3rd by trying to use 8 SATA hard drives and a more recent C2D. I had much better luck with older CPU's and only a couple of hard drives.