*Disclaimer* I'm NOT a professional reviewer, but I thought I would share my experiences since this is a fairly new product/chipset.

I bought this for my Home Theater box to replace a GBT DS5 that never worked right. I'm not going to post a bunch of pics of the board itself, New Egg has some really nice shots if your interested. I will post a few though.. And I'll reserve a few spots for Bios Shots and final thoughts.

From what I've read the biggest advantages of the 785G over the 790GX is support for DX10.1 and an update UVD. I was actually hoping for Hybrid graphics support of 4k series video cards, but from what I've read the highest card that can be used for Hybrid is still the 3450 (which I happen to have ) I'll do some testing with that too...

Overall build quality of the board seems to be excellent, it has an 8+2 PWM section with cool looking heatsinks on both the VRM's and the NB. The board is also one of the 1st (AFAIK) Asus boards built with the 2oz copper trace strategy started by GBT that is supposed to help signal strength and keep the board running cool.

PACKAGE CONTENTS:



I also bought a couple other goodies for my HTPC rebuild, a Samsung 1TB EcoGreen F2EG and a Scythe SHURIKEN Rev.B low profile cooler, decent cooling and it's supposed to be very quite. I also liked the fact that the fan blows down onto the board, which should help keep important board components cool...

SCYTHE INSTALLED:




One undocumented(?) thing I noticed was a jumper "OV_CPU", which I can only assume allows the board to give the Vcore more juice than bios would normally allow. It's not really all that important to me since OC'ing isn't what I bought this board for, but you just know I'll have to play with it while it's still on the bench....

OV_CPU JUMPER (sorry for the fuzzy pic):



Well.... My data has been moved to the new 1TB drive and my OS has been imaged to the old data drive (WD 500), so I'm off to play...