This was a pretty good deal at the time. The BIOS is pretty easy to navigate, with many OC options. The system fan controller, Fan Xpert 2, was lacking some features, but I worked around them by lightly modifying the profile files. One feature I’ve found to be extremely helpful is the BIOS Direct boot hardware button. I’ve needed that a few times when I got stuck in bootloops while testing tolerances. If you plan on overclocking on a UEFI system, make sure it has this. The biggest downside is that the extra two SATA ports are Asmedia and do not connect with the Intel RAID controller. This gave me some headaches with some configuration tests. The Asmedia ports are not bootable, but can be unmounted from an OS. The hot swap for these ports don’t always like to cooperate. I’m currently only using one for my ODD; so far no problems with that.
This motherboard is exactly what I needed, it works well and was easy to set-up when I booted the computer the first time. It was my first computer build, so I was a bit scared that I would get lost, but there are some pre-sets that make it very easy and then the advanced mode has everything I was looking for after looking up more information. I would've taken an additional PCI-Express slot, but I knew that before I ordered it, so I won't count it against the mobo.
This motherboard is exactly what I needed, it works well and was easy to set-up when I booted the computer the first time. It was my first computer build, so I was a bit scared that I would get lost, but there are some pre-sets that make it very easy and then the advanced mode has everything I was looking for after looking up more information. I would've taken an additional PCI-Express slot, but I knew that before I ordered it, so I won't count it against the mobo. It also comes with 3 6gb/s SATA cables, which is really practical, since the ones I ordered are shipping from Asia in a boat and a scheduled to be delivered on Jan. 27 (I got the shipping confirmation from Amazon on December 15).
The only TINY little con that I have with this motherboard is that it has LED indicators that can't be turned off, and they aren't all the same color. The Power button on it is permanently red, while the other LED are green unless something is wrong with what they check, in which case they turn red. It isn't a big problem, but since I wasn't going for a red build, I thought the red LED was too bright.