Sigh, why do they always have to skimp out at the last second? With this type of board, why in the world would you bundle it with only a 6 channel audio instead of 8? Also, why do dual lan instead of integrated bluetooth and wireless? And instead of the eSATA port that no one uses, I would have rathered an mSATA on this board for a small boot SSD so that I can make the case even smaller and more discrete. So much missed opportunity here in my opinion.

With this type of board, why in the world would you bundle it with only a 6 channel audio instead of 8?

According to the specs at Gigabyte's website, you can actually get 8 channel sound out of it, you just need to get it from the mobo, not the backpanel directly. However, that's actually the least strange thing. Two PS/2 ports and a serial port, yet no usb3 at all, not to mention s/pdif. A PCI slot, not a PCIe. They even wasted space on an IDE connector. Is this ancient stuff because of the chipset? I wouldn't dream of getting a mobo like this for any purpose unless I got it for free from some drawing...

I'm way more annoyed at that lack of SATA patch-count: What is it about anyone refusing to build an FreeNAS/ Intel motherboard?