Pros: This is my first time buying a Supermicro board and I am very impressed with everything. The packaging it came in was plain and simple. The manual was robust and the six SATA cables are 18" instead of 12" inches. Unlike many of the i7 boards I've seen (Granted, this is E5500 and not i7), this one has its PCI-E slots spaced normally. This means that one is able to use two passive PCIe video cards without them overheating, although this is probably due to the lack of a need to support an SLI bridge (which this board does not support). Onboard audio makes it perfect for a desktop system as it eliminates the need for an addon card. It's also got two legacy PCI ports. The manual is written very well and in proper English (and not some poor translation).

Cons: For this price it would be nice to give some more SATA ports or SAS ports via a second controller (Intel ICHR10 can *always* only give six ports). No legacy IDE (it's a good thing I just bought a SATA optical drive). Also, this device has two sensor chips, one of which is not supported by Linux (at the time of writing) which means that hardware monitoring will be a problem (I have difficulty installing the Superdoctor software in Linux, although it is officially supported). No overclocking, but this is expected from a server board. Placement of the ATX and EPS power connectors are horrible for my case and have already caused one SATA power connector to crack (because one of the drive bays in my case is located about an inch from that area). I wish the specs would state more clearly that you MUST use both processors to utilize all the RAM slots. This uses AMI BIOS and has serial redirection as an option. However it is disabled by default, which means that on a bios reset

Overall Review: (cont.) you will need to attach it to a VGA display in order to manage the machine. This seems rather foolish as serial connection is usually considered a failsafe. I do hope they change this in later revisions; althout this is the second machine I am using with such a BIOS This board will take regular *Desktop* memory (UDIMM, or unregistered memory) and you do not need to buy ECC RDIMM for this. The heatsink mounts on this board (and apparently on all 5500 boards) are NOT compatible with i7 heatsinks (with the plastic push pins). These use *Screws* and the holes are too small for the plastic pins. Also, you MUST have two processors installed in order to use all six memory banks. This is due to the memory controller being integrated into the processor, and the fact that the 5500s use two QPIs, one to access its own memory, and one to access the memory of the second CPU. This of course makes it faster, but it does bring about that limitation.

Pros: this monitor is certainly a step up from my laptop panel; although my old panel had a higher resolution - 1440*900, this is still much more impressive, the screen is bright and highly adjustable - very ergonomic and recommended for anyone who gets sore eyes looking at the same screen in the same direction after a few minutes - the picture quality is superb and the resolution looks higher than it really is. this is also a beautifully designed piece; sleek and sexy design make this an ideal choice for saving space as well as showing off

Cons: now for the bad part. mine came all banged up; i ordered overnight delivery, but i didn't know that the monitor would look as if it didn't have a good night's sleep. the power adapter was scratched and there were some marks on the base as well. there seems to be some case of static inflicting my monitor, as when i look from a close distance, i can see the pixels in the darker colors "sparkle' and in a black screen it really looks ugly. also, while the design may nice and sleek, it is also flimsy, whenever i rotate or pivot, the screen goes out of line (nothing damaging, but it's a bit annoying, trying to manually insert the thing in). the screen quality with the pivot software is not top grade, the video is not as it would be in normal horizontal oriented resolutions

Overall Review: i would recommend this piece, and if i would have known the condition it were in, perhaps i would have still opted to buy. but i'm giving three stars because of the horrible condition it arrived in.

Pros: This heatsink is quality and VERY heavy for its size (about 1LB); the fans are quiet at 1k RPM (unfortunately the BIOS here is buggy and I do not have any way to make it spin at full speed since Linux does not have an hwmon module for my board). This seems to provide some cooling for the VRMs next to the CPU as well - this is nice.

Cons: The fan is not "Removable" per se; you need to remove the heatsink from the board first and then remove the screws mounted at the bottom of the heatsink.

Overall Review: I haven't had a chance to test this entirely, but this is by no means the kind of fans/heatsinks Intel makes for their desktop CPU. This is quality stuff. Note that this will NOT fit an i7 LGA 1366 socket without perhaps a third party mounting solution. Even then, you would probably be better off getting a bigger heatsink as this seems designed for the Xeon 5500s which run cooler as opposed to the i7. Using two of these with dual E5520s (80W each)

Pros: To be honest I've only had this for a few weeks, but it seems rock solid, not making any strange noises from the power regulation, and is overall just heavy. The 140mm fan cools off the whole chasis - which is good. for those people complaining that it does not have an exhaust: When you have such amount of air coming in such a tiny space, you don't need exhaust because air is forced out the sides. Running a Dual E5520 system (was worried it would not work), but functioning fine and voltages are rock solid.

Cons: Fan is apparently brushing against something or is broken. This means I will need to choose between downtime (RMA and all) and voiding the warranty by opening this thing and replacing the fan (or placing whatever it's brushing against further away). There should be a way to replace the fan without voiding the warranty. Flimsy SATA power connectors. One of them already broke. The plastic on them is so thin and fragile it's amazing. Considering everything else is very heavy and solid, it's pretty absurd. Also attached PCIe is not necessarily welcome, as this is supposed to be "modular". Cables are VERY stiff, pretty much defeats the point of manageability, but this does not leave a Frankenstein of cables in my case as my other PSU does.

Overall Review: It's modular so it's good. I assume I can get replacement modular cables. Also there are WAY too many PCIe cables and not enough SATA cables. It's nice and heavy though.

Pros: Excellent performance, Intel has improved their virtualization platform, thereby making it not as abhorrent. Although apparently there is still the issue with real mode emulation. Memory controller on the chip means cheaper boards and more flexibility.

Cons: The i7 is overrated. This is indeed nominally a nehalem, but the TDP for this chip and the relative increase in performance seems to be a 1:1 ratio; which means it would not be right to call it "More Powerful" than the Core platform. This chip gets quite hot while on load. Hyperthreading also makes the chip much hotter and intel is still pushing the same lousy technology which make the P4 even worse. Just like the P4, in benchmarks it was touted to give an increase of 30% while in real world applications the increase is around 5%

Overall Review: The architecture is truly innovative; however the real cream of the crop here are the E/L55xx Xeons which have a TDP of 80/60W respectively. I do not know whether intel has actually made this chip less power eficient to market the xeons, or whether the xeons are actually a much different chip (despite them both being Nehalem based).

Pros: Looks nice and shiny. BIOS lets you store and save profiles so you don't need to manually enter everything whenever you mess up. Tons of overclocking options.

Cons: Where does one begin... Firstly, with AHCI enabled it takes about 15 seconds until the OS's bootloader even shows up. That is quite a lot of time compared to my previous system. Also the arrangement of the SATA ports (at least in my case) made it almost impossible to attach anything to it without removing the PSU. Chipset heatsink makes the x1 and x4 slots unusable... Now for the real 'Fun' part: Apparently this motherboard has some power-saving feature which cannot be disabled. This means your PSU will make squeals that may or may not be tolerable. Furthermore, this 'power saving feature' undervolted my entire chipset and I had PCI devices constantly appearing and dis-appearing. The most notable of which was the onboard dual ethernet. I also fail to understand why such a cheap and low quality chipset (realtek) is placed on a $300 board. I actually had to (1) Turn off all power saving features, (2) Disable HPET timer, (3) OVERCLOCK(!?) in order to make the squeal more tolerable.

Overall Review: (cont..) apparently in order to stop the squealing and supply of non-standard voltages (which most likely also damages the PSU) one must place deliberate stress on it. I've gone through three PSUs with this board (each time blaming it on the PSU rather than the board itself): FSP 400W, Apevia 500W (which came with the case), and ThermalTake Toughpower 650W. They each exhibited the same exact problem in conjunction with this board. In conclusion save yourself some money and get a real quality chipset and motherboard. Go with the 60/80W Xeon 5500 series which is truly more innovative than the 130W i7 9xx. If you don't plan on gaming and don't care for SLI and just want a workstation, then use the Xeon. That is probably what I will do after I RMA this overpriced "Gaming" garbage