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I have a great ATI video card, and I believe every SLI established board is just big $30+ tax to Nvidia so I really liked the fact that this has everything I need without paying more for features I do not want.

Some salient points you do not find in most reviews:

1. Extremely stable board booted the 1st attempt and was rock hard since.

2. Boot time is only OK without RAID or old parallel seem to take nearly 16 sec. To get post screen and another 15 to get to the windows loading point. Time to 1st usability with Windows seven is about 45 seconds without many of startup programs.

3. Onboard sound looks good for me, the controlling UI is OK and working and allows you to do things like set the balance of your back speakers etc.

4. Sleep Mode works great by expand this works seamlessly, it shut off every fan in the system so it’s totally calm and speed time to resume is great.

5. With an SSD and Windows seven you really never seem to wait for anything.

6. Asus has a great support forum and typically looks to churn out new bios updates and utilities.

7. Looks better in person than in the pictures where it seemed a little to pastel but in person it seems slick.

Negatives

There are two chassis fan plugs, one cpu and one “pwr”. In speedfan you may be able to only control the chassis fans together and you can’t change the CPU fan by voltage if you have a three prong fan instead of four prong and you may be able to never change the “pwr”.

The Asus windows utilities look a little too tacky and generally seem way to big and clunky for what they really do.

The memory bays are really close to the CPU I do not think I could use four slots with the Noctura unless I moved the fan to be exhaust only.

Tips

Remember to attempt and setup the hard drives to be AHCI rather than IDE. This shaved about ten seconds off my boot time.

The stock BIOS did not really do a great job with turbo boost, but the 0711 Bios fixes that.

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Two of two people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of five stars
Good basic board,
October 25, 2009

By&nbsp,Robert Millbrae, CA See all my reviews

Asus has some number of variants of this board based on your needs. This is one of the basic variants. I have used Asus boards for many years and they generally included back chassis adapters for serial port, firewire and audio, but none of they are included here just the MB connector for each. There’s also no support for a floppy drive. If you still use them, you will have to use an external USB floppy drive. The board supports six SATA devices some of the expensive variants support 8.

I’m using an i7 860 chip, 8GB Corsaire memory 4 sticks and a Noctua NH U12P SE cooler. There’s plentiful room to access the memeory slots provided you orientate the Noctua top to bottom. If you orientate front to back, I’d install the sticks before mounting the Noctua.

The only utility I have played with so far is the Auto OC feature. When I tried it, it changed the stock 2.80Ghz up to 3.46Ghz which is where it still is. System looks to be stable over clocked.

My only negative on this board could be the position of the two PCIEx1 sockets. They both lie between the two PCIEx16 sockets. My video card covers the 1st PCIEx1 socket generating it useless.

This board/chip for me is probably an interim build a year or two. Other than the debate on the future of socket 1156 vs socket 1366, I could expect to see onboard support for SATA6 and USB3.0 inside a year.

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One of one people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of five stars
worked great right out of the box!!,
December 3, 2009

By&nbsp,P. Ballard Central Coast, CA See all my reviews
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