Pros: - Case is very sturdy (also heavy but seems quite durable - Modular nature and great cable management makes maintenance very easy. I've already swapped out the motherboard and several of the fans and the whole process was quite simple - Did I mention cable management? With all the holes and slots, cable management is fantastically easy and I can hide just about all my cables - Another things that's nice about the modular nature: all the side panel thumbscrews stay attached to the side panels. This allows you to take them off but not loose track of them - Front panel is very sleek and looks sturdy. Buttons are obvious and I really appreciate the LED mode indicator on the case. Even though the fans don't seem to talk to the motherboard, the LEDs certainly do which allows it to sync with my MSI motherboard. Granted, the only LED on this thing is the PSU dividing panel, but hey.

Cons: - Fan controller is quite basic: you either have high or low settings that are either noisy or quiet. I feel there's no middle ground where cooling is adequate but fans are still quiet - Fans themselves aren't the best. They certainly aren't the worst but the airflow wasn't great. I've already swapped two out with high volume fans and it's helped to a degree (see my other comments) - I had the male end of the SATA power connector responsible for the fan controller just break off inside the female end of my power cable. I was able to gingerly get the exposed pins to fit into the connector still, but they're easily dislodged. It's basically a cheap plastic part and guess what, it failed. - Instruction manual is a little lacking. I've been building inside of an older case for the past 7 years and so I haven't kept up with the newer front panel connectors. I had to look up the USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C connector because it wasn't obvious what it was.. Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to have seen that in the manual. - Fan controller doesn't seem to speak to the motherboard despite being plugged in. Despite these cons, I still give the case 4 stars because I feel like I will be quite pleased with this case for the next 8 years until I need to upgrade again.

Overall Review: I would recommend moving one of the two front fans to the top of the case (unless you have a radiator, in which case that's where that gets mounted). The hot air rises to the top pretty easily and the fact that the case has built-in gaps for air flow around the acrylic side means that getting air into the case isn't the issue, it's getting the hot air out. So prioritize putting good fans at the top and back of the case. If you don't plan on overclocking, you can probably get by with the three included fans but if you do overclock, you're going to want to concentrate your heat removal at the top near the CPU. At first, I put my high volume fans in the front and it didn't seem to help at all. Putting them up near the CPU seems to have done wonders though.

Pros: - Affordable - USB-C port on the back - Wifi on a motherboard at this price range is a great deal - Featureset is adequate

Cons: - The BIOS is not very good. None of the settings are explained and using the QR codes that you'd think would be helpful just sends you to the manual which is really of no help at all. - Voltage regulation is absolute garbage! I popped in my Ryzen 2700 (no x) hoping to bring it up to the speeds of the 2700x and although I was able to reach 4.0 GHz, I would set my voltage to 1.42V and have it droop all the way down to 1.34V. There is no load line calibration (LLC) for the voltage so that's basically what you're stuck with. - Front panel audio connector didn't work for me. And no, it's not a case problem because I then went and bought a new motherboard because of the lack of LLC, that motherboard worked flawlessly. - No USB3 Gen 2 connectors for front panel

Overall Review: I've heard great things about ASRock motherboards being great for overclocking but this one not so much. Without effective voltage control, your voltage will be all over the place. I went ahead and bought the MSI x470 Gaming Pro and other than the lack of WiFi and USB-C, the boards are functionally identical. MSI has a better BIOS, better software, and actually includes LLC for about $10 cheaper. Also, you can look at videos online of the temperature sensors on this board being wired so that they reset to zero when they get too hot.

Pros: - Extensive overclocking tools<br>- Works well for the most part<br>- Installation went quite well and I was even able to reuse my CPU heat sink from my LGA 1156 build

Cons: - Constant sound issues (described below)<br>- Boot settings in the BIOS keep getting scrambled. If I choose to boot from a CD, it defaults my boot order so that it always boots from the CD (even when I choose using F12 which should be temporary). Also, it often scrambles my boot order by selecting a hard drive without Windows on it to be the booting drive. EDIT - Here is a list of intermittent sound issues I've encountered (I'll update later): - Distorted sound - Sound channels get mixed up (thinks left is the subwoofer) - "What You Hear" gets played in addition to my microphone as a recording device - Windows was unable to control the volume of my speakers

Overall Review: The sound issues with this motherboard have been frequent and annoying:<br><br>First, the board doesn't seem to like the front panel audio on my Coolermaster Storm Sniper case. When I plug in my headphones, it will either play nothing through the headphones or play sound through both the headphones and my speakers simultaneously.<br><br>Second, the Creative Sound Blaster software recognizes when I switch to headphones and correspondingly changes the sound configuration from 5.1 to stereo, but when the headphones are unplugged, it refuses to switch back.<br><br>Third, Windows 10 constantly has two High Definition Audio Devices listed in the device manager with one disabled. Now this isn't a problem in of itself, but it may be symptomatic of poor driver support.<br><br>Fourth, it appears my sound has finally bit the dust. When I just started up my PC my sound and Ethernet adapters had missing drivers and when I reinstall the drivers, they claim the hardware is no longer on the system. I'm going to try defaulting the BIOS and then flashing it to see if that helps but this is seriously annoying.<br><br>Gigabyte, I really wanted to like you after using ASUS motherboards for my last two builds and I was pleasantly surprised when my memory worked out of the box (as opposed to on my ASUS builds where it always seems that my memory is unsupported). It seems like quality mobos are hard to come by these days.

Pros: Good sound Lots of features Large number of ports for various inputs

Cons: Automatic calibration didn't with for me Zone 2 speakers only take analog inputs Sounds stopped working just after 2-year warrantee expired

Overall Review: This receiver worked great until it just recently stopped stress having intermittent sound problems. You would have to restart it to reinitialize the sound to get it working. Finally that stopped working and you had to do a factory reset to get it too work. That just recently stopped working. Also the net feature would often freeze and then wouldn't work for a long while after restarting the receiver.

Pros: - Cheap - Drive series is excellent

Cons: I tried two of these drives in a RAID 0 configuration for games and after a couple months of use one of them failed on me and I was forced to buy two of the retail versions instead. I used the remaining drive in a RAID 5 and now it seems to be causing some faults there too.

Overall Review: If you're doing a RAID, go for the retail versions and save yourself the grief.

Pros: - Good Connectivity - High Bandwidth - Good firmware - feature rich

Cons: Setup was a pain at first but I think that had more to do with my cable modem. However, the Cisco Connect setup wizard oversimplifies things and thus would not let me set up the router without having an internet connection. Additionally, using the advanced setup wizard (if you're used to browser-based setup like I am) tends to screw with cisco connect. Also, for some reason you cannot set the guest access privileges or password outside of Cisco connect. Interestingly, the guest connection appears as an open wireless connection but if you open up a browser, you're prompted for a password there.

Overall Review: I've done a bit of online testing (no LAN benchmarks yet) and have easily been able to achieve very nearly the speed of a wired connection with the wireless. Pings are very low for the router and are within variances verses a direct connection to the cable modem. Overall this is a good modem but the Cisco Connect software is highly annoying for more advanced users.