If I was going to build a Core i7 system I'd definitely go with the MSI. Though that's because it has one feature that I always look for ... eSATA ports on the backplane. USB 2.0 is just not quite good enough for my external storage any more.

The catch is that I'm not interested in Intel's newest wonder-child. Too many "power saving" features for my tastes. Plus I want to give some of the rest of you sufficient time to beta test. So by this time next year that MSI board should have dropped in price, and Intel will be making more Core i7 chips (likely with some small revisions). Then all I have to worry about is getting one of the older chips. ;-)

"What really hurts the Xtreme Audio is its lack of support for real-time Dolby Digital Live or DTS encoding. This essentially limits multi-channel digital audio output to source material with pre-encoded audio tracks, which games lack."

Now that HDMI is here, this is no longer an issue. If you want multichannel digital audio, then you use the HDMI output on your ATI videocard for uncompressed digital multichannel audio. There's no longer any need to encode as lossy DD/DTS to fit the surround down an SPDIF...

I was getting all excited for the MSI until that awful wannabe-Creative *THING* showed up. I've gotten far too comfortable with my HDA on my Gigabyte to go proprietary for so little. Right now I have good Linux support, OSX support, real-time dolby and DTS encoding, the works.

I go MSI and I lose all of that, plus I probably get Creative's quite horrible drivers back.

MEH I SAY!

I'm so glad these ultra technologically advanced motherboards still have PS/2, floppy, IDE and PCI ports. That means I can still run my hardware from the 486 era. How lame!

Come on Taiwan, get rid of these ports already. IDE and PCI I can forgive but PS/2 and floppy. Intel removed them from their motherboards. Get with the program guys.

This Mobo is number 1 in my box, too bad about the crazy money.

If you dont like those ports dont use it. MOBO makers dont put them for you. XD

I prefer PS/2 KB and mouse since no need to detect and sometimes some glitch in the bios the USB KB wont be able to work again specially on P4 aged systems

dude, $350 for a MoBo, for that kind of money it'd have to give me a loving hug every time I start my computer... but really, I know that's early adopter kind of stuff, but for the price of a i7 rig you can build your own homecluster and get drunk on Chateau Lafite...

Each of the JMB322s is responsible for two of the white SATA ports and offers driver-free RAID 0 and 1 support. However, rather than riding the PCI Express bus, each of these chips hooks into one of the GSATA controller's two Serial ATA ports. The hardware RAID stack in the JMB322s makes arrays connected to them appear as standard hard drives.

This sounds really handy; is it a common feature on motherboards? How can I tell when shopping for a new P45 board whether it has something like this? I mean, I know I can look at the photo and see if they are color-coded like this (though I imagine even then I might be guessing), but is there a way to tell on the "specifications" page (e.g. on newegg)?

Floppy isn't going to die for a whlie still, first for WinXP or other OSes that need a floppy for pre-install drivers, second because there are some diagnostic apps that work best off a floppy. USB floppy emulation usually works OK but the point of floppy is that it's so rock-solid compatible and low level enough that it's useful for certain things. IDE...meh...there's actually less reason to keep IDE than either of the others imo because it doesn't have any great utility over SATA at this point. But if they want to keep including it I won't mind, having the option to use an IDE optical is always kind of nice that way when I want to boot off an ISO that doesn't like AHCI/RAID on the SATA channels I don't have to change that stuff in the BIOS.

Intel knows that only hardcore performance freaks and workstation-types are interested in i7 Core platform.

The problem is that Core 2 is still good enough for everybody else and is quite affordable for the most part. In addition, AMD currently does not have any competitive part to the i7. The obvious result? Intel is going to milk the generous budget of the hardcore performance freaks and workstation segments for their worth, until AMD comes with something more competitive.

This all reminds me of the early Slot I and Socket 5 days.

Kudos to Gigabyte for some harware RAID love and also for a very practical approach to eSATA. Hardware RAID 5 would have been stellar, but they still deserve props for what they've done.

As for the ease of loading RAID drivers in Vista - that's great as long as you're using Vista, not that I'd run anything else, myself.

Overall, I give the win to the EX58 even if the boards were priced the same.

What's the point of that PCIE 1x slot on the Gigabyte board? That heatsink is so close to it I have a hard time thinking of cards that could fit. And 2 double wide graphics cards would leave you with no PCI slots.

Yes, but would the author pick the Gigabyte over the Asus?

What about Gigabyte EX58-DS4 ?
Will be a lot cheaper than DS5, but no ultra durable 3 or SLI .

First iPost for the i7.

Yea, at this point I think I'll hold out at least until the 32nm shrink for i7.