Thanks for the review.Asus site forum posts on this board have claimed that the assistant fan (circulating air under the armor) interferes with most boards that could go in the top PCIe1x slot. So you have to give up either the fan or the slot (and the fan seems like a necessity on this board). Did you find the same thing?

Regarding the use of this fan: rather than push hot air (from just above the graphics card) into the armor cavity, it would make much more sense to have the assistant fan blow out away from the motherboard. That would pull cool air from the edges of the motherboard in over the low-power components. Overall, and when used like this, I think the armor is a very good idea. This is the board I would buy for Sandy Bridge.

The fan isn't a necessity. It runs perfectly fine without it, with i7 and i5 with dual GPU and 16gb ram overclocked to 4.8. Is a great board though. Built 5 overclocked systems with this MB and never used the fan. I will say I have used the Antec 900 with them all which has great airflow though. I will ask though, I have been finding that a lot of the ASUS MB's won't wake up properly from sleep when overclocked. To the point of needing a CMOS reset. And then having to turn the sleep function off in windows 7 64. Can you verify this? I have found this happen to me on the Sabertooth P67, P8P67, P8P67 Pro and the P8P67M pro

I'm missing more details / measurements on the feature that makes this board unique: the TUF armor. Measuring CPU performance to find that 3 boards perform within a 1% delta seams a bit futile. And the intro reads like an advertorial, not like an objective review. All in all i'm a bit disappointed in this article.

Anyone know how to reset the BIOS manually? I can't find the resetbios/cmos pins on this board or a cmos battery