Pros: After some minor items in the CONS section, the board has been performing great. I have no complaints in that regard. It has good startup times with the M.2 drive in place (again, see CONS), and once I'd worked out some issues, it's been solid for days, even under some heavy testing.

Cons: This was obviously Gray market and re-packaged on a return. - No shrink-wrap on the box - The plastic seal sticker on the box had been cut. - There were no screws in the box for mounting anything. - There were no cables in the box other than two odd extension cables that I have no idea what they're for because... - The manual was in Mandarin Chinese. While most of these were just highly annoying for me, I can see someone else returning the product immediately. It was sold as brand new and clearly wasn't. Someone wanting to mount this in a case as a new computer wouldn't have had the screws to mount it into the case. Luckily, after 40 years of doing this, I have boxes of screws. So I was fine. Except for the M.2 screws -- which I had to order to screw down the M.2 drive. It doesn't make for a great experience to wait two days for a $5 bag of screws. Once I finally had it all together, the POST code lied and said I had a video card problem when It was some salvaged memory that I was hoping still worked. The audible POST tones mapped to "video card error," but when I snapped a picture of the board LED, it read as a memory error. (And I had downloaded the English language manual by this time, so it wasn't a mistranslation of Mandarin.) I swapped in some different memory, and it worked, but after pulling the video card, despite the board having its own Display Port and HDMI ports, the board then complained about there being no video present. The video card went back in, and the board worked. Like I said, a bit flaky, but once it was running, it was all good.

Overall Review: The board does what it's supposed to, and the computer has been fine.

Pros: - Large for a reasonable price - Worked well... for a while

Cons: - One of the three drives that I got for a RAID5 array failed after three months. Will need to purchase another to rebuild the RAID, as I can't wait for an RMA to get a replacement. Never had a drive fail that fast before, especially with a rather low usage rate (less than 5% busy.)

Overall Review: I'm not sure I'd recommend this for a non-RAID setup. I'd hate to see what would have happened if I lost 3TB of data because I didn't have it full RAID5.

Pros: This cooler was installed easily enough for one of these types of water-coolers, which means there was only a moderate amount of fiddling with collars and brackets and fiddly screws. It appears to be working quite well, maintaining a reasonable temperature despite some pretty heavy workloads.

Cons: Why can I not find a cooler that doesn't look like a discotheque? I just want a work machine, not a light show, yet the same kind of cooler without lights is often $60-70 more than one with lights. Yes, I don't have to plug the lights in, and I didn't... but who wants cables all over the place? I had to tie-wrap all the light plugs to the side of the fans since the wires couldn't be removed. And the plug for the cooler block itself at least can be removed -- until you put on the AMD CPU block, at which point the plug is blocked from coming out. Nothing like having to take the whole CPU cooler back apart again to pull out an RGB cable. And who designed these silly RGB cables anyway? There are no clamping connectors and three half-inch long pins sticking out, just waiting to short out components on the board. Not sure who came up with this "standard," but they should be taken out and beaten.

Overall Review: The cooler itself has been performing well and keeping the CPU at good temperatures. But if you want just a water-cooler and not a light show it's a bit more complicated. Why these companies can't sell the same product without the light show, even at the same price, is beyond me.

Pros: First, a little background -- I hadn't upgraded machines in a while. My AMD Phenom II with six cores was more than showing its age. But I have a stack of servers running dual Xeon 16 core CPUs that I can use to compare this chip. Quite simply, it leaves them in the dust. Compressing an hour of high-def video to HEVC on the Phenom was a painful 6-7 hour process; on the Xeon's, it took 2 hours. On this chip, it takes under 20 minutes. I can go from POST beep to login screen in 5 seconds. It's so fast it's scary, and that's with only some old 2133 memory. I'll be grabbing some 3600+ memory at some point and seeing if it improves more. For now, I'm enjoying running compiles that used to take 10 minutes in under 20 seconds. Highly satisfied.

Cons: Other than the tiny, tiny dot to mark the "one" pin -- I'm old, my eyes aren't that good anymore -- I have nothing to complain about on the chip.

Overall Review: I'd definitely recommend this chip. It's fast, easy to use, and I had no issues with it. If I was building a stack of machines for a transcoding farm, this CPU would be at the top of my list.

Pros: The box has run without a hitch non-stop since getting it set up. No complaints, no worries, no errors. Time Machine support is flawless, the macs in the house saw it immediately, and they now backup without worries. iTunes support seems to work, but I haven't really put it to the test yet.

Cons: Initial setup was... a bit tricky. I bought the unit without drives, and installed 8 TB (4x2TB) in a RAID 5. What they don't tell you is that there's no bios in the box. It took a while to figure it out, but one quick format on a drive to put on the bios from a windows box later... the whole thing just worked. Initial parity writing took over 24 hours, but the drives were fully usable during that time.

Overall Review: There are no manuals in the box, and it took me about an hour to figure out why I was getting nothing but error lights (no bios on the box) -- once fixed, this thing has just purred along. As for the comments about it being loud,,,, I can't even hear it over the power supply fan noise of my main machine. I have to lean within 6 inches to hear it at all.