"We do think Gigabyte has made a motherboard with a lot of potential here -- the board currently works very well under default conditions. It has tons of features---and some are genuinely great little nuggets---far, far better software and very good performance for DDR2 but even though it has lots of BIOS options we are unable to use with the board in its current state. Strip out the four Gigabit Ethernet sockets and strap on 802.11n Wi-Fi instead would give it a similar high end appeal but with more variety for home users. The hardware RAID implementation also needs more thought put into it.

What is has done for us is lay the foundations for what could be some awesome value friendly EP45-DS3R or the DS5 that we had a first look at not too long ago. However, we'll give it a few months to see what Gigabyte comes out with on the BIOS side before we really see if they can shine."