yeah i hear you on that, it did concern me as well too. but once you hear the sound card it comes with, yes sound card not on board sound its amazing. i think it sounds better then my audigy 2 card. it does everything to make games sound amazing like changing pitch when you walk on difference surfaces, echo's, etc. works great with my 5.1 set up and it can use 7.1. so in my opinion you dont need a sound card with this board.
much more hardware will be made for pci-e 1x and it has a couple of those so soon you will be able to utilize those more.
it has 2 gigabite nics so you dont need those. so you have the 1 pci for your tuner and i cant see much more needed.
the cooling system the motherboard is the best of the best, nothing is left out to keep this motherboard cool, the bottom of the board has heat strips the top is filled with heat sinks and heat pipes that are 10 times better then other cooling systems and heatpipe set ups some of the other motherboard use.
OCing on the board is the best, it always resets it self to the previous working settings not to the default settings when a oc fails.
it has a digital display on the motherboard that shows you post codes! best feature ever. when the motherboard doesnt post, has trouble posting, or just something isnt working it display a 2a code or a 7e code right on the motherboard and you just look it up and tells you the exact, exact problem.
i mean i know i sound like im trying to sell this board lol but there really is no down side to it, and being that ive used msi, asus, gigabyte etc. which are all fan favorites and i use this board on my main system im just impressed from a company that fell down on the performance scene and really did a great job.
