Strengths: easy overclocking bios, dual Gigabyte LAN, easy board to setup

Weaknesses: Color Scheme, RAM slots, IDE connector, 8x PCI-E in SLI, Driver CD

Summary: setting up this mobo was simple with a E8500. the bios menu are easy to navigate and overclocking menu was a breeze to modify. i brought up the color scheme cuz, it's not that appealing, but that's negated by the performance of this board. the RAM slots location could be higher up seeing how most GPU will extended near one end of the RAM clip. GPU must be removed first before the RAM could be accessed. and yes, i still have a PATA HDD & DVD ROM, using a full tower case, the IDE connector sits near the bottom and there's no way to connect both the HDD and DVD at once on my setup. if you are into Crossfire, the other pci-e slot is rated at 8x. installing the drivers on the CD always locks up, then i have to do a cold boot to get it working again. other than that, good starter board for others that don't need the fancy mumbo jumbo that $200+ mobo gives.

Strengths: Great performance, DualBIOS, Infineon TPM 1.2, Energy-Efficient, Quiet, Comes with free anti-virus.

Weaknesses: PCIE x16 Slot not properly working using default BIOS settings, even with the F8 version. Some of the Gigabyte utilities do not work in Vista.

Summary: This board works great with my Core 2 Quad 6600 and 2GB Corsair DDR2 800 memory. Installing Vista on RAID 0 did not require any separate drivers on floppy disk. I like the fact that I can use whole disk encryption like Bitlocker with the onboard TPM chip, since this provides additional benefits such as offloading encryption and decryption from the CPU, password recovery, and etc. I had a problem with the board working properly with an eVGA 8800gts 512 G92 graphics card in PCIE x16 slot with the F5 BIOS that shipped (along with every subsequent BIOS revisions that I tried upto F9). It would not boot at default settings (no video) so I had to insert the card into the PCIE x8 slot to configure the BIOS, then move the card to the x16 slot. Hopefully a future BIOS revision will fix this so everything works using default settings. With later revisions of the BIOS, it takes longer to boot with its auto-detection of peripherals feature (that cannot be turned off).