Conclusion
Time – f we only had all the time in the world we could really get into more detail about what was covered and touch on what was not. We did test the networking and some of the other less notable features of this board but there is only so much time in a day to get the work done. So how do we feel about this board? Good, but that is not to say there was not anything really outstanding and those few outstanding things move this board up a notch in our view. What were those things?
The BIOS on this board really impressed us. We were pleased at the easy move from a traditional BIOS to a UEFI BIOS. The mouse functions were smooth and the BIOS were responsive, the layout was very good, the tools to setup and tweak your system were easy to find and recovery was as simple as using a USB key to load a saved OC profile.
The AI Suite was a highlight allowing on the fly overclocking or tweaking, giving access to the wireless setup allowing easy setup of connection sharing.
RAID, RAID – RAID! Add the six RAID ports to the wired/wireless capabilities and an i5 or i7 CPU and you get a VM or media server. 5 disk RAID provides great read speed through the spectrum and the ability to have two raids and storage on the separate two port controller can give you a great computing experience.
So it comes time for the final verdict on this board. Though it did get some global points on HWBot we just have a hard time deciding what level it is. Is it gold or silver? Is it best in class? Not really. Is it equipped for extreme cold? No.
Well the fact that you can get an easy no BIOS overclock in Linux through the EPU and TPU switches and you can get a decent performance boost from the Turbo USB 3.0 Giving you fast external storage options.
This board gets a gold for value added.
Available at NewEgg for 209.99, TigerDirect for 188.97,
Jump: Introduction
Jump: A couple of nice additions
Jump: Specifications and Advanced Features
Jump: Phase design or Digital power management
Jump: BIOS Gallery
Jump: Included software/utilities
Jump: Setup and Testing
Jump: Gaming and System Benchmarks
Jump: MVP Testing
Jump: Power and heat
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