Dream board - best ever owned.

I had my doubts about purchasing an Asus motherboard, although my husband has always used this brand and has never had problems. I on the other hand have always been an EVGA user and was such a devoted diehard fan that it took me months to make the switch. This was the best decision I could have ever made. Upgrading from my previous setup of an EVGA 780i board to this board was like night and day(okay so this is obvious 775-1366) there is going to be a difference. On to the motherboard itself: The layout is good, I can't say great since you are not able to insert a dual slot video card into the last PCI-E slot; a limitation to those that want to run a true Tri-SLI setup. Other than that the board is nicely setup and allows you to connect a multitude of peripherals. In my setup I have a Core i7 920, Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 heatsink/fan, 12GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 MHz memory XMP-1, 2 Sapphire HD4890 Toxic Edition Video Cards crossfireX, Creative Soundblaster X-FI Titanium Champion Series soundcard with the I/O drive; 1 WD velociraptor 150GB Hard drive (boot), 1 WD 1TB Black Edition HD, 1 WD 500GB HD for backup, 1 Samsung DVD/RW, 1 LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray burner, 1 NZXT Sentry LX Fan controller, powered by a Corsair HX1000W power supply in a NZXT Tempest mid-tower case; with 3 120mm fans, 2 140mm fans and a G.Skill memory fan; running WIN7 RTM. Setup, installation, configuration & initial bootup was smooth and sweet using my husbands ViewSonic Fuhzion 3D monitor; **my Acer 23" only flickered**, WIN7 loaded in 7 minutes with everything installed minus 1 set of memory and 1 video card. Upon entering the OS for the first time there were no errors and no unknown devices and the system flew. I have never had an install go this easy before. Setting the memory was super easy - entered the bios selected the XMP 1 profile left everything else to auto and the rated timings of 8-8-8-21 2T 1600 was set without causing any BSOD's, freezing or hiccups. Next setting up the video card was just as easy; installed CCC and adjusted the fan from auto to manual and the graphics were breath-taking. CPU just 2 changes and I was at 3.8GHz (easy). The bios on this board has an abundance of features that most users will appreciate. On a downside with the extreme overclocker; I have noticed that some features are not adjustable such as the ability to manually set all of the individual memory settings which limits your ability to squeeze every oz. of memory performance. The positives are you are able to take full advantage of your processor and achieve very high overclocks on air with this board either through V-Tune a windows based overclocking utility (easy and instant that records back to the bios) or directly through the bios through the tweaking menu. Either way you choose you will not be dissappointed. For a novice user upon first entering the bios you can become a little overwhelmed with all of the options, features and settings but the manual does an extremely good job of explaining every configurable option. This is the first motherboard manual that I have come upon that goes into this much detail about the settings and how each one functions. I must say that I was extremely impressed with the extra detail that was taken with the manual. Finally, the included software suite is a real nice addition to the operation of the motherboard. I would buy this board over again in a heartbeat without a second thought.Read full review