Excellent board, but can be finicky.
Pros: Inexpensive, well made, beautifully labeled, very clear manuals and instructions
Cons: Looks like the energy saving features might clash with Windows 7 64-bit, awkward placement of SATA ports
Although it's way too early to give this board a proper review, I wanted to take the opportunity to pass along this info. The build was smooth, I avoided any problems with the rear-facing SATA ports by pre-placing all the wires I was going to need. The problem was that it kept going to sleep, which I did not know why until after a long round of testing, part replacement, etc.
Turned out it wasn't a hardware issue, but a power settings issue. Looks like Windows 7 Pro 64 bit was set by default to Power Saving. For some reason the advanced settings to Turn Off HD's after 20 minutes and Allow Hybrid sleep were turned on! Just had to change to High Performance and change those two settings to NEVER & Voila!
Other than that I like this board. I will take off one star for that & for the SATA ports.
AMD FX 8350
Samsung 840 250 GB SSD
Hitachi 1 TB HD
Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 OC
Seasonic M12 II 650W
Corsair H80i
Corsair 16GB 2X8 DDR3 CL10 VNGNCE
Sony DVD-Rw
Cool Jag thermal compound
Rosewill Challenger case
Turned out it wasn't a hardware issue, but a power settings issue. Looks like Windows 7 Pro 64 bit was set by default to Power Saving. For some reason the advanced settings to Turn Off HD's after 20 minutes and Allow Hybrid sleep were turned on! Just had to change to High Performance and change those two settings to NEVER & Voila!
Other than that I like this board. I will take off one star for that & for the SATA ports.
AMD FX 8350
Samsung 840 250 GB SSD
Hitachi 1 TB HD
Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 OC
Seasonic M12 II 650W
Corsair H80i
Corsair 16GB 2X8 DDR3 CL10 VNGNCE
Sony DVD-Rw
Cool Jag thermal compound
Rosewill Challenger case
