I think you miss the point somewhat. This fact that you point out is so blatantly obvious to anybody that Ilya has simply declined to spell it out, since X-bit's reviews are generally not targeted at such a dim-witted audience as you apparently expect. :) Remember that by this point in the review, he has already taken apart and put back together the heatsink assembly, so to imply that he doesn't understand the function of its parts is somewhat of a ridiculous accusation.

More generally, X-bit's reviews are normally critical of features of this nature that serve only as decorations and have no functional purpose. This type of comment is clearly a personal choice, but I happen to agree with it, especially in the case of motherboards--which are not normally on show. I think anybody else having seen this motherboard would agree with Ilya that it is indeed a "very strange solution" because the backplates are clearly constructed from ribbed aluminium and could certainly function as heatsinks if the rubber grommets were replaced by a thermal pad in the centre, while if their purpose is only mechanical then it would be cheaper to have them made from stamped steel. However these points need not be laboured because they are immediately clear to any normal person, so I do not see any problem at all with merely mentioning it as an aside as Ilya has done here.

"And who copied who,intel copied nvidia with xmp or nvidia copied intel with EPP?!Everybody knows the answer."

Ilya never even mentioned anybody copying anybody. All he said here is that nVidia, who as we know defined the EPP 1.0 specification along with Corsair, has decided to adopt Intel's proprietary extension for DDR3 (i.e. XMP) as the official implementation of EPP 2.0. If you are looking this hard for bias in such innocuous comments, then no wonder you find it, even if it is purely imaginary.

Having said this, however, while I appreciate the principle of "once bitten, twice shy," I do think that the introduction to the review is overly negative and has the tone of a foregone conclusion. That there is no recent official BIOS for this board, that the overclocking performance is not particularly amazing despite the claims, and that data corruption issues are not entirely fixed are certainly not great things. However, to say that these problems will never be fixed is probably unwarranted. Notwithstanding the high price as also pointed out by Pixelated below, the conclusion given--that this board is a solid performer provided you don't run into any of the niggling issues--does not really justify the initial doom-and-gloom outlook.

You had take it to a totally different point.You weren't hard at this board at all but you said that the 680i is a poor and very defective motherboard wich is not true,I have a 680i and it is a AR version from EVGA and i do run my Core 2 Duo E8400 towards 3,9GHz with no problem at all,in fact it's the most reliable board i've ever had.It has much more features then intel mobos,it's much much more tweakable and it's faster for games (mostly).Sure the 790i is overpriced,just as the x48 is a joke and relatively overpriced but the 680i is not and wasn't at the time it was released;Talking about that it's quite a bit long time it was released,and the 680i still kicking with really good overclock and a lot of good features.What about those 965P intel boards ? Do you see any of those around ?
You see,during the time intel have to release new chipsets twice,just to keep up whit nvidia overclockability and reliability,Nvidia still holding the flagship.