the board does about 20 Mhz better on the FSB with the same E8500 that was used on the Gigabyte X48T (DDR3) DQ6 board.

what i see with the PCIe 16x slots is a slight limitation...if you do not intend on doing crossfire and just run one video card, that card can run at 16x (PCIE 2.0 specs)...the 2nd PCIE 16x slot will not function with anything plugged into the slot...it is powered but the bios will not recognize it...i have an Areca Raid 8X PCIe raid card that i wanted to operate in the 2nd 16X slot...in order to do that, i had to move the jumpers on the board to enable crossfire which puts both 16X slots into 8X speed....it is not a big thing because the speed is there for a single video card, as long it is a PCIe 2.0 specs card...i have an 9800 GTX card.

i'll run some 3D benches tomorrow or later on this morning to show the differences between the X48 DDR3 board and this board with the same video card used on the X48T.

basically...i could do 500 FSB @ 8x on the GA-X48T DQ6 board (GSkill DDR3-1600 memory) and this board i can do 520 FSB @ 8x using only GSkill DDR2-6400 memory..pretty good!