Ok Folks.... I've had the whole weekend to play with this new board.

Overall impression is that it's well constructed, but like most new hardware/chipsets the firmware/bios still needs some work. I've gotten burned a number of times buying new gear and I can usually tell the difference between POS hardware, and a nice board that just needs a tweak on the firmware. I put this board in that catagory, excellent hardware, but the bios still needs some work. It's an economy board, but I still have hope that Asus will put a little effort into the bios... I really beleive it has alot of potential!

Here are the things I've found out about the board over the weekend:
Keep in mind these are 1st Gen Bios, hopefully they'll be fixed in future updates!

I'll go with the positives first...

1) The OV-CPU jumper I mentioned earlier allows you to crank the Vcore all the way up to 1.9v!! In the normal position max Vcore = 1.7v (which is still plenty in IMO).

2) UNLEASHED Mode DOES work... I never really pushed it hard, because thats not what I bought this board for, but it did successfully unlock my known good 720 to and X4 and ran it up to 3Ghz stable.

3) 8+2 Power section with decent heatsink... Even at 1.4 Vcore it never really got hot, neither did the NB heatsink.

4) The VIA Audio chip. I was actually a little concerned about this. Most of the better HT boards use the Realek 889 series chipset... What can I say, my worries were totally unfounded! The VIA chip and drivers work better than any of the Realtek stuff I've ever used! Finally my center channel doesn't sound muted when the audio is DTS 3/2.1 and I don't have to run my reciever volume @ 50+ to hear what people are saying. The software is better by a factor of 10 also!

5) The CnQ and system fan controls work really well for a quiet system and the fact that you can control Min Vcore when the system shifts to the Low Power state is a nice feature and helps quite a bit with stability.


Now for the Bad aspects...

1) If your going to run this board under a 64bit OS and use the IGP, DON'T TRY to do it with 2Gb of system memory and expect to get good HDVideo results! Even though the board has 128Mb of sideport Mem I had a hard time getting it to run with sideport only, and when set to Sideport+UDM it left me with less than 1Gb of system ram (Not good!)...

I did finally get it to run glitch free Blu-Ray w/UDM but I had to go into MSCONFIG and shutdown unnescesary things at startup. (Make sure you set "Frame Buffer Location" to "Under 4G" if you only have 2Mg of system ram)..

2) Don't EVEN try to run Hybrid graphics using a 3450 (best possible). This relates to the above problem.. I mistakenly thought that adding the 3450 w/512Mb would solve some of the memory problems, It Didn't!!! In fact it opened a whole new set of problems that resulted in multiple resets, power switch resets, and eventually taking the box apart and removing the 3450.... PITA!

3) There is no option to set the NB/IMC Multi. Not that big a deal for me, because I bought the board for a HT box, but if you plan to use it as an OC'er it's definetly a handicap...

4) Back to the Heatsink situation... The PWM and NB heatsinks are really cool looking, and seem to do their job quite well... The SB Heatsink on the other hand seems to be pretty inefficeint, I'm sure they made it small and low set to keep it from interfereing with Video Cards, but it gets pretty HOT, using an IR Probe it hit temps above 52c.... I'm not sure if this is really a problem or not, but it did cause me some consern.


FINAL THOUGHTS:

If your looking for an economical HTPC board w/unlocking potential for PhenomII's this board would be a good choice.
I actually like it!

If your looking for a cheap OC'ing board, you may want to wait a little while and let the Bios/Drivers mature a little. I could be wrong, but I think this board has ALOT of potential! If you want a good cheap OC'er right now I don't think you could beat the GBT 790XT-UD4P though.