Good board, Yes it's a bit hot.
G'day SV,
Congrats on the new board and processor. Should be great.
I have had the same board in my main desktop system for two years and it is rock stable and has great performance. I use it for gaming, photo editing, video conversion and of course a bit of work now and then (environmental simulation & statistics). I always get stuck hosting the Arma2 game server for my friends because my system never skips a beat under full load and never crashes (unlike theirs).
On my MSI X58 Pro-E, I have my i7 920 D0 permanently overclocked to 4GHz with the FSB at 200MHz, uncore at 3.2GHz and RAM at its stock 1600MHz. In bios I enable all CPU features except TurboBoost (because it boosts the voltage up so high every time it activates). I enable all power saving features and spread spectrum (I don't like EMI in my audio system). I set the memory timings manually to those specified my the manufacturer. Don't use AUTO - it set my timings too fast and was not stable (1T instead of 2T). Also I set the voltages manually in the bios because the MSI AUTO settings tend to overvolt a fair bit, leading to unwanted heat and power draw. For my CPU, I needed CPU core +0.14V (1.249V), CPU PLL=1.80, QPI/VTT=1.20, DRAM=1.60 (as per RAM specs), NB =1.1V, ICH=1.5V.
Make sure you get the latest bios and drivers for it (
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/X58-Pro-E.html#/?div=BIOS)
These X58 boards do get hot. The northbridge is designed by Intel to run happily up to 100 deg! Many users of this board were worried by noticing load temps of 90 deg for the NB even though few noticed any instability or performance issues. The issue is well documented online with various suggestions on what to do about it. The leading suggestion is do nothing - it is probably fine to run hot. But more fussy users like me, or who planned to overclock, decided we could improve the temps by swapping the original thermal glue pad for thermal paste and tighter screws (for example
http://mattgadient.com/2009/09/06/reducing-the-northbridge-temps-on-the-msi-x58-pro-e-motherboard/). I also screwed on a spare fan I had lying around from an old AthlonXP cooler (see pic attached). Make sure you can control the speed of any little fan you put in there, if you go that way, because they can be noisy. The bios lets you undervolt a fan to slow it down, if you don't have a fan controller.
The only bad things to say about the board are firstly I cannot get S3 sleep to work when the FSB is clocked over 167MHz. It works fine at all lower clocks, but since I am running at 200MHz FSB, its no dice. This has not been resolved by bios updates and probably can't be fixed. But with an SSD on board, boot times are not a big deal and hey, I save a bit of power by not leaving it in sleep all the time.
Also, like all X58 boards it lacks modern interfaces like USB3 and SATA6. You can always add these yourself with PCIE cards, but they wont be quite as good as having an onboard solution like newer chipsets for Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPUs. Having said that though I'm happily running my OCZ Vertex3 SSD on the ICH10R (SATA3) and it is blazingly fast. The bandwidth limitation does not impact small file read/writes so much, which is the true HDD bottleneck.
I don't currently have a crossfire or SLI setup but may do in the future. One hesitation I have is that the board does not have much breathing room between graphics cards, so the suffocated ones tend to run hotter and their fans get noisy trying to such air down the narrow gap between the cards. This issue is not specific to this board and seems to be the case for almost all SLI motherboards.
Good luck with it.