Pros: Good feature set.
Good layout, except that that right-angle SATA connectors make a VERY tight fit in a mATX case - straight up-and-down connectors would have worked better.
Generous heat sinks. Lots of overclocker-oriented features.
Best-in-class power consumption. Doesn't beat peers by a lot (5-10W), but every little bit helps.
Cons: This board's BIOS ACPI implementation is broken. If you have a NVidia video board, and try to play video using hardware acceleration, you may experience hard locks when the OS tries to do any ACPI power management shifts (P-state, C1E halt, etc.). You may also experience hard locks when the OS uses another CPU core. The only way I could get my HTPC to not hard lock when playing accelerated video files with a NVidia board was to disable every single power management option in the BIOS, and to disable all but one of the Core i5 CPU cores. This defeats the entire purpose of having a Core i5.
If you boot a Linux boot CD on this board, you will notice an error message on boot saying that ACPI is disabled because the DMI tables' contents are corrupt. You need to use acpi=force to enable ACPI under Linux. Further dumping the tables with Linux tools reveals that things are just bad with the ACPI data on this board.
There is a beta newer bios (F4h vs. F3). Tables are better, lock-ups rema
Other Thoughts: The hardware on this board appears to be well done, it appears to be entirely a software problem. Hopefully, this will get fixed in time. But this board is clearly marketed towards HTPC users, and hard locks when playing video using a NVidia card is a serious flaw. At the moment, that makes this board inappropriate for HTPC use.
I swapped this board for a competitor's P55 board, and all these lock-up problems went away immediately. I can enable power management, and all my CPU cores, and play accelerated video on NVidia without hard locks.