I recently purchased this motherboard along with an i5 750, and 2 sticks of crucial's ballistix ddr3 memory. I have seen massive improvements over my old core 2 duo set up, and would very much recommend this motherboard to anyone trying to build a computer for standard use, or for gaming under a budget.

it features everything you would expect from a motherboard, and looks very slick with a blue and black colour scheme. it has a couple of extra features, such as ASUS's mem ok feature, which allows memory to be put in a kind of safe mode if you are having problems booting up. it also has 1 port of each optical digital audio and firewire and e-sata.

one disadvantage of this motherboard over the EVO and deluxe versions is the lack of SLI and proper crossfire. the graphics is managed by the processor, which limits the capacity of the graphics to 16x. with 1 graphics card, it will run at 16x, but 2 will run at 12x and 4x, not the 8x and 8x which would be better, this is a feature reserved for the most expensive models.

the northbridges functions have been replaced by the CPU on the i5s, and so this frees up alot of space on the motherboard. it is full size ATX anyway, and this extra room means ASUS had alot of freedom in putting everything in very well organised places. this also allows for more power regulation around the CPU, and a generally nicer and cooler board.

accessory-wise, the board is pretty bare bones. it comes with the i/o shield, a sticker (which is nice to see), 4 sata cables, an IDE cable (why?) and some little plastic things to make case connectors very easy to do.

i would very strongly advise this motherboard for any computer system wanting to run a single graphics card. if you think you might go SLI or crossfire in the future, this is not for you, and neither is any i5 board. i am very impressed with the build quality and software also, and this this is an excellent product.