The board is great. The price is good and there are many features. The best part is that you can overclock and use integrated graphics. Some newer Z68 boards don't allow you to use integrated because they have no video ports and I think the whole point of Z68 is to be able to use the combined features of a P67 and H67.
The board has no fans on it. This makes my build silent because everything else that I have is quiet. The heat sinks keep the board cool with good temperatures without the need of extra fans.
This board, however, had some small annoying problems. One of the main problems is if you turn on the TPU switch so that the board automatically adjusts your setting for the best stable overclocking, I noticed that the system would shutdown 2 or 3 times before it boots into an operating system. This would happen every time I would turn on the computer. In other words, once you hit the power button, the system would start up and then shut off before it reaches BIOS and then shut off again and then restart and finally boot into windows. I wrote to Asus about this problem and they said it had to do with voltage settings in the BIOS. I turned the feature off and everything was fine once it went through the process of shutting down. I guess the shutting down has to do with the board adjusting itself for overclocking.
Another problem is that you can't boot into windows if you don't have a cpu cooler fan connected to the board. This is a big problem if you are using a cooler that doesn't use a cpu fan such as a water cooler. In my case, I am using a Noctua cooler and if the fans are connected to the cpu fan connectors, they will run at full speed and I can't control the speed of them. If I connect them to the standard 3 pin fan connectors then the system would get an error. I even disabled the BIOS cpu fan warnings and set them to ignore but that didn't help. I wrote to Asus and their information was useless. Basically I said I'd like to be able to have no fans connected because they run at full speed and I want to be able to boot without a cpu fan. Their response was repeating what I already said. The person said that I can connect the cpu fan and it will run at full speed. Eventually I found a solution by myself in order to boot into windows but I still have an error screen showing up for a few seconds.
Aside from these problems, it's a great board. I'm sure that most of the problems could be fixed in the future with a BIOS update. ASUS LGA 1155 SATA 6Gbps USB 3.0 Supported Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2400 Motherboards P8Z68-V PRO
A little bit expensive but the V-PRO is decent.
The board feels solid and looks great.
Works great so far.. almost a week with this thing.
Don't forget to INSTALL THE INTEL LAN DRIVERS from the provided CD or else you won't be able to access the net. Specially if this is the only PC you'll be having in your house for the first time.
Will update thoughts about this mobo later on.
I was able to use the built in GPU from the i5 2500k with this board.
Great OC feature as well: I just set the Turbo Multiplier to x43 and automatic 4.3 Ghz oc! The board adjusted the voltages automatically. Great for noobs like me who want a simple OC.
I have not used all the features yet but the board is great. I have an i7 2600k Sandy Bridge with a Corsair H50 cooler. It oc to 4.5 mhz without a hiccup and runs at 30c, 38c while gaming. I have an ssd with Win 7 and everything loads lightning fast. The software that comes with it is nice. I'll be tweaking things in the future. Definitely one of the nicer and more stable boards I have owned. I love it.
Build: Intel I7-2600K, 8GB G-Skill Sniper RAM, crappy old video card, Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler
I have been a huge fan of ASUS motherboards, and this is the third one for me. It is probably the most disappointing of them all, and its very possible I will not continue with Asus line going forward. Here are my observations after the build and about a week of use:
Pros:
* Solid motherboard with nice heat sinks and is able to hold my behemoth CPU fan without any issues.
* Pretty solid on overclock, and an incredible amount of control given to the user via the Bios for tweaking anything we like.
* BIOS upgradable from Windows, no need to put on USB stick, etc.
* Ability to upload custom boot up image ... but I disabled it anyway to speed up booting.
* Built-in Bluetooth connection. Of course it barely works (which has been my observation with all BT) and I have not had too much luck getting anything useful accomplished syncing it with my android cellphone.
* Good number of USB3 ports.
* Power / Reset buttons on motherboard. This comes in handy if the case is not fully wired or has issues.
* Optical-Out for built-in soundcard.
Cons:
* The old ASUS was indestructible. No matter how bad the overclock was, powering off then on always allowed MB to detect my screw-up and reset. Not this one. After a bad overclock, it kept freezing on reboot without any possibility of detecting overclock problem. Luckily a tiny 'MemOK' button above the memory bays allowed a hard reset. This of course makes overclocking awkward. I am hopeful that this is due to certain type of failed overclock, and other types of overclock failure will be detected properly.
* The SATA plugs are at the edge, with the holes facing the side of motherboard as well. Unless you have a huge case, it will be extremely hard to plug new cables into SATA ports. I had to unplug most of other cables on the MB before succeeding (because hard drive cage is right next to that edge). I suppose this improves thermal cooling, but its extremely cumbersome. I would recommend plugging in SATA cables before all others unless you have a huge case with lots of room.
* The CPU Fan header at this point only allows PWM fan to be connected (old motherboard worked both ways). Many competitors do allow that fan header to operate in both PWM and Voltage regulation mode, but ASUS decided not to bother. Unfortunately many CPU fans (including Noctua) still do not support PWM, so I cannot have the fan regulate speed via Bios. I sincerely hope that Asus improves this in the Bios (assuming it is even possible), meanwhile I had to buy a $15 adapter just to get that feature. I understand that we have to move on with new technology at some point, but with a huge amount of non-PWM fans on the market, this is silly.
* Somewhat slow to post on boot. After lots of tweaking I got it to 15 seconds before Windows logo comes up, but it was taking twice as much time before, and I had to disable lots of things for it to happen.
* Bloated, ugly software - thankfully easy to uninstall.
Other observations:
* The onboard video (driven by Sandy Bridge GPU) allows up to 512mb ram assigned to video, UNLESS you're running in dual-monitor mode, at which point amount of RAM is hardset to 64mb in the bios. I don't really know if this is a motherboard restriction of Intel's.
* For some odd reason there is no message during post on when pressing DEL will allow bios setup to start ... you pretty much have to guess. I don't think I have ever seen a motherboard that didn't indicate the time when bios access is available.
* 24 hours of Prime95 in blend mode - motherboard auto-overclocked to 4.5ghz while the test was running, and not a single issue. I don't know though if this is a testament to the CPU or MB, or both.
In summary, its a decent motherboard, with great overclocking features, however considering its price the drawbacks are inexcusable and make me regret the purchase.
I have not done any overclock yet - as my one attempt soured me to the experience (see above). I will start on it soon though once my PWM adapter arrives. - Sandy Bridge - Lga1155'
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