Customer Reviews
Good price motherboard 
2008-01-02
This motherboard is a great buy for casual users who are not thinking of overclocking or don't mind that only 1.8v memory seems to be the only way to max out your memory, the mother board does work as advertized.
Works great with Core 2 Quad and 4 gig of memory, sound is acceptable.
I found no problem with it, once I upgraded the bios, but I did have some problems with heat and bios malfunctions, once I downloaded and upgraged the bios all the problems where gone.
There is a lot to like about this motherboard, just make sure you use 1.8v memory or you will have plenty of headaches.
high stability and quality 
2007-12-08
This board installed easily and has been very stable with Vista 32 for 3 weeks.It's a great board for such a low price.The quantity of interfaces and ports is completely sufficient for the majority of applications
Really good MOBO if youre building a media center 2007-09-11
Like the title says, its a really good mother board if youre building a media center, i put this one together with a evga geforce 8800 GTS and a core 2 quad, with some hyperx ram... its just beautiful to hear and see!!! the only con i found was support for only 2 ide devices, so it means if you have 2 whatever drives... you have to set up all your hd on sata.
Core 2 Quad Motherboard from Intel that enforces big changes. 2008-06-17
This is quite a compact board and an essential for Core 2 Quad processors like the almighty Q6600. However this board has new standards that many users may find hard to agree with. The first is that it forces you to drop PS/2 connections (unless you get adapters) and the 3.5" Floppy is officially extinct with it. While it can handle IDE this is really built for SATA drives. So quite simply if you have already found your 3.5" Floppy disks gathering dust and your PS/2 connecting hardware in disuse and no need for IDE anything and if you want to go with the latest cutting edge Core 2 Quad processors and don't mind experimenting with a bios to get your SATA drives up and running then this is really the next phase in motherboard evolution that is built to run systems designed for high end activities such as gaming on Microsoft Windows Vista (DirectX 10) with lots of memory, fast SATA drives, the Q6600 processor and a GeForce 8800 PCI-e or better.
While some components are a tight fit (some memory is millimetres away from the wiring with some cards in the PCI-e slot, so get the memory in before the video card) and some cards are literally going through a little more than a gentle force to flush with the case (this depends on the ATX case design though) it is still a robust fine choice for anyone who just wants to go with a brand new cutting edge PC. In this respect those who want to port IDE drives and hardware over a year old to this motherboard should expect a seriously hard time with lots of problems especially if it also concerns an XP installation which simply won't recognize the SATA drives without a driver that can only be installed via 3.5" floppy that this motherboard doesn't support. Avoid that nightmare, keep your old PC as it is and just try to go with new gear. If you do your rig will run like lightening and you will be playing games like Crysis and Bioshock on high settings in no time.
Stable no-frills Performance 2008-05-30
I have had this board running every day for over 9 months now (Enermax 720W, E6850, Mushkin DDR2-800, evga 8800GTX, Vista Premium 64, SATA RAID) and it's a real nice setup. Went together well. No overclocking, no major hassles. Sometimes I wish I had bought the D975BX2 instead so I could crank up my CPU. But that's just when I play Crysis ;)
The SATA driver at Vista install is a pain. The driver comes on floppy, and the mobo has no legacy floppy support. If they put drivers on a CD it would help a lot. I had to jump a few hoops to extract the driver files onto USB drive, which works for install. If you have an external USB floppy drive that should work too, I think.
The only "issue" with this board is the DirectSound driver sometimes won't reinitialize after sleep. That means no sound at all. I returned the first board due to this. It still happens sometimes, but a reboot fixes it. I'm running Vista64. My buddy has Vista32 and hasn't had the sound glitch on his.
Overall a good board for a solid system without any monkeying around with overclocking or wasted hours tweaking. Just buy good 1.8v DDR2-800.
BTW I get OK ping but am always first to login to gameservers during mapcycle.
Raid driver supplied on floppy for a board with NO floppy port 
2008-04-08
If you are building a system, don't get this board if you are planning to use XP (any flavor) or need/want a floppy drive on the system. Give me a break Intel! This board doesn't support such ancient technology as a floppy disk drive!! What I found really funny is that the board comes with the raid drivers supplied on a floppy. Intel made my system build a little more difficult. 12 USB ports is nice, guess I'll be using a lot a them!
Solid P38 Board for 45nm CPUs 2008-03-10
This is a workhorse board for someone not interested in spending $200+ for the X38 chip set and wants the upgrade path to the new e8000 and q9000 CPUs. Yes, over clocking is not a feature but then we are not paying for a board to OC to begin with.
Something you should know before you buy this Mobo... 
2008-01-18
Before you decide to buy this board and intend to use win XP you should know this:
You will need to install that RAID/SATA driver into the hard disk before you boot to the XP installation, even if you have one hard drive. Otherwise the installation will stop. The problem is that this driver is on the CD that came with the board and on a floppy. You can't use the CD because XP doesn't let you get it from there before installation and you can't use the Floppy because this board doesn't support it. Is so stupid to put the driver on a diskette if the board doesn't even have a floppy connector but you can try a USB floppy to install and use F6 on windows installation to load the drivers. I didn't want to buy a $20 USB floppy just to do that (it is not guaranteed that it will recognize the USB floppy), so I had to create a personalized windows disk by copying my original Windows CD and adding the SATA drivers to it (Slipstream).
If I had known this before I wouldn't bought this board. With other Mobos you don't have to go trough this process.
The reason I'm giving this product 3 stars is that is very stable, it has many features and it's working perfectly after I installed everything. It's not bad if you are setting up a Quad Core or a Core 2 Duo machine and will use Windows Vista.
Note that if you will use Vista you won't have any problems because it will let you load the drivers from the CD during the installation.
