The difference between your experience with this mobo and mine with the M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 (which could not find the CD -- in an IDE drive) prompted me to a more detailed comparison of the specs. of the two boards.

Both have the same SB850 chip handling SATA drives but different chips handling IDE drives, but I assume that you were booting from an SATA optical drive anyway. Perhaps eCS would install on mine if I used an SATA optical drive.

I assume that yours does have a recent BIOS, otherwise it would not handle the 6-core CPU. Or is that an invalid assumption?

Did you try /SMP /PIC ? Did you try OS2APIC.PSD instead of ACPI.PSD ?

Here, with ACPI 3.20.03 the board runs very fine. All 4 cores of my Phenom X4 965 are running. Energy saving (throttling) also seems to work. With '/VW' added to ACPI even my Adaptec 2940UW who serves the scanner (HP ScanJet 4C) works without a problem. The Realtek NIC runs well with r8169-0.1.1.wpi. With Airboot and os2ahci even ahci works fine - the system seems to be react even a little bit more smooth (and the HDs are a little louder).

So, for me this fits very fine! But no praise without criticism: The reactor widget only shows 'Zz' and thermal.exe is not able to determine the CPU temperature.

OK, just after writing the last commentary, I changed the settings of reactor widget to 'P5B' as Mainboard. And, tata, 46.0. C it is telling me!