Asus A8N-E

THE BAD:
Add in PCI raid controllers can conflict with the NVraid and cause serious problems if booting from NVraid. Chipset fan is poor. Have to add a firewire card to this system.

SUMMARY:
This is a good workstation for CAD, engineering, audio/video or general performance use for someone not interested in SLI. I just set this up to replace a Gigabyte board that crashed. It is best used with up to 4 SERIAL ATA drives which can be configured in RAID many ways. The 2 IDE channels limit options if installing more than 2 total CDROMS, Zips, etc. Add in RAID cards can have serious boot sequence conflicts in the BIOS with NVraid, so they should be avoided. The upside is that the NVraid performs very well with CPU usage of 2-6% generally in RAID 0. This is no concern in a dual core system. Firewire is not onboard, so that is an exra add-in card. The simplicity of the board made it easy to set up. Documentation was on the better side of the MB market, which is in general poor. It supports ECC or non-ECC memory which was a plus for me. The chipset fan should be replaced with something of better quality from a third party prior to board installation. It uses an EXTA power connector which will require an adapter if the PSU is not this format.