Joined on 11/25/10
Sweet Mobo
Pros: This is a solid board, is has a nice array of options in the bios and it's rock solid. I simply unpacked the motherboard, installed it, hooked everything up, turned it on and it just worked.
Cons: Only con I can think of is it only has 1 pci x16 slot, the other one is a x4, but that's no big deal to me since I have no plans on running Crossfire or SLI.
Overall Review: I can definitely recommend this board, it's as stable as a rock for me so far and has everything I need.
Solid PSU
Pros: Plenty of power. (1000W) It's very quiet. Only time I hear it is when I power the system on I'll hear a click, but that is all. Perfectly normal. Fully modular. Which is great obviously since it makes cable management much easier. I installed this PSU in a Rosewill Thor V2 case (Full Tower) and the cables are indeed long enough for a full tower despite what someone may have said (Only 1 was a little short, see cons). I have the cables ran through the back of the tray to hide the ones I actually am using. Looking at HWMonitor and my BIOS hardware monitoring section, I can see the voltages are extremely consistent, more consistent than my old PSU - A 450W Rosewill Capstone 80+ Gold PSU which is also a fine power supply, just needed a little more power for what I wanted to do. (Or in this case, a lot more than I need!)
Cons: Only con is the CPU Power connector cable is a little short, but still long enough for a full tower, just don't plan on trying to hide it since that won't be possible. It is long enough to maneuver it in a way so it doesn't get in the way of airflow.
Overall Review: So far I'm impressed with this PSU unit. It's been rock solid so far and I'm quite happy with it. I probably won't replace this thing for another 5+ years. (Assuming it holds up, hopefully it will!)
Great drive!
Pros: This is a great hard drive. I bought this to house hundreds of games for convenience. Plenty of speed and space. I Benchmarked it at a average of a transfer rate of 149.6 MB/s on HD Tune, my WD Blue 1 TB drive had 130.6 MB/s average.) It does "feel" a little faster in terms of load times and responsiveness compared to the 1TB WD Blue.
Cons: Nitpicking here, it does run a little warm compared to my other drives. It idles at 40c after it's been running for a while, never seems to get higher even under load. My 1TB WD Blue came in at 31c. The cooling is decent in my case, I'm using a Rosewill Thor V2 with the fan speeds at their minimum settings. It's not loud, but it is audible under load compared to my other drives. I don't have a problem with that though. Despite the slight cons if you can even call them cons, they're not enough for me to take off eggs as the drive has performed great.
Overall Review: This is a nice hard drive. I've never had problems with Western Digital over the course of 10+ years of owning their drives. They always have been reliable for me and I'm hoping this one will be as well going into the future. So far, so good!
Solid graphics card
Pros: This card is fast, performs great in all of my games so far pretty much. No crashes, no blue screens, no problems. Nice image quality.
Cons: I do have one game that doesn't want to cooperate with this card, but it's a pretty old game: Neverwinter Nights 1. I'm still trying to figure out a workaround for this. However, in all of my new or newish games, it's flawless. That was the only dud. No big deal.
Overall Review: I just installed the new Catalyst 13.12 drivers that came out, and it's preforming well. I was running the 13.11 betas for a while as well with no problems. I think I did notice the rare screen jump issue in some 2d games with the betas but I haven't seen anything yet on the 13.12 WHQL. I can definitely recommend this card, price/performance ratio is perfect in my opinion.
Excellent CPU
Pros: This thing is pretty fast, especially for the price. It's got 6 cores and it overclocks to 4 ghz on stock voltage; meaning a free overclock with minimal to no additional heat output. My old CPU was a Phenom 8750 triple core and this blows it away, encoding a movie in Handbrake took about 1-1.5 hours, now it only takes 10 minutes. This CPU also runs pretty cool, I am currently running it on the stock cooler with Tuniq TX-2 thermal paste and it idles at 30c and 58c on load at 4 ghz. Note: I do have decent airflow in my case. This CPU seems to eat all of my games for breakfast too, 60+ fps in everything.
Cons: Only thing I can note is that I would recommend installing the Bulldozer hotfixes from Microsoft for Windows 7. Other than that, none. This thing performs admirably.
Overall Review: As I said, the CPU can overclock to 4 ghz on stock voltage with the stock cooler and performs just fine in terms of cooling as long as you stay on stock voltage. If you want to go beyond 4 ghz, you will need to increase the voltage; in this case, get a aftermarket cooler. I do plan on getting one before summer.
Sweet mouse
Pros: Awesome build quality. I can't imagine a mouse having a better build quality than this. This is about as good as it gets with that aluminum base. Seems accurate, good software and dpi options. The mouse wheel is very precise unlike many mouse wheels I have had to deal with in the past.
Cons: None.
Overall Review: This is a fairly large mouse, but despite having small hands, it still fits well in my hand. I have this mouse paired with an XTRAC mousepad and it seems to work pretty good. I highly recommend this mouse.