Pros: In a gaming system, this board coupled with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 Haswell CPU and an NVIDIA GTX 660 really zooms. Installation was as easy as a motherboard installation ever can be (you always have to deal with cable routing and such). Connectors are clearly documented in the manual and clearly labeled on the board. The circuit board itself seems to be of high quality, and ASUS used reliable connectors. I used to design circuit boards professionally, so these are things I notice and care about! Upgrading the BIOS is dead easy. Just put the new BIOS file on a VFAT-formatted thumb drive, power the system off, insert the thumb drive into one specific USB port on the back, press and hold the button next to that USB port, and wait a minute or so until an LED stops blinking. Reboot. Done. The BIOS is so configurable that even as a computer engineer I found that there were more options there than I really needed. If you want a board that you can deeply configure for overclocking, this is a good choice. I tweaked the things I wanted to tweak and kept the defaults otherwise, and the board is running stably and smoothly for me. If you're a beginner, the menu might be a little intimidating, but the defaults normally will work fine. When researching this board online before purchase, I found one review that said you couldn't install Windows 7 on a solid state drive with this board. That's nonsense. I did just that and had no problems at all. Windows 7 boots off a SATA SSD for me in about 10 seconds. The onboard gigabit Ethernet chipset performs nicely. I am doing game development and use this system to capture multi-gigabyte videos, which are transferred to another system for editing. The onboard Ethernet can fully stuff the GigE pipeline as fast as my network switch can go. I give kudos to ASUS for providing a very detailed manual for the board, when a lot of companies don't seem to do that any more. This matters more than you might think, because unless you have another system nearby during installation, looking up configuration instructions online may not be very convenient, so the printed manual is a very useful item.

Cons: The Realtek audio driver has a known bug (documented online) that causes it to fail at boot time. Online, the consensus was to upgrade to the latest BIOS to fix this. I did so, but the problem persists. My video board is providing sound output, so I simply uninstalled and ignored the Realtek driver, but this may be a problem for others. I'm assuming ASUS or Realtek will fix it in a driver update, but for now this cost it one star in my review. I found some of the marketing hype around the board's features (especially the bundled software) to be a bit excessive, but it can be ignored and doesn't diminish the quality of the board itself. Frankly, some of the software wasn't of any interest to me, so I didn't install all of it.

Overall Review: I bought this board with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 CPU as an upgrade for a gaming tower, replacing another ASUS board that has worked well but can't keep up with the newer games. One installation caveat: Be sure to plug in not only the main ATX power connector, but also the PCI Express power connector located near the CPU socket. If you miss this step, the board will power up but won't boot. This is documented in the manual but easy to overlook, which I did the first time through! Get the cabling right, and you're off and running. My fault, not the board's, so I didn't take away a star for this.

Pros: It is full 1080p screen exactly as advertised. Not much can compete with my Macbook's Retina screen, but this little GeChic monitor is really good at both color definition and brightness. I am able to power it off my Macbook Pro using just one USB port, even with the MPB on battery. I am amazed at the efficiency of the GeChic. I'm using it for game development in Unity and for putting virtual machines in full screen mode beside my main system display, and it's doing great for both applications. There is no visible lag whatsoever on the GeChic, even with 3D game rendering and animation. Colors are bright and well-balanced, and my unit has no visible bad pixels. The protective cover flips around to become a magnetically-secured adjustable tilt stand; IMO this is a great design feature. The overall size of the GeChic 1303H is almost exactly the same as a 15" Macbook Pro Retina, so they pack very nicely beside each other in a backpack or laptop bag. I use two monitors in my office, and until recently I didn't realize it is now feasible to have a *portable* second monitor. This little unit has been a really liberating factor in my work! EDIT (January 2017): This little gem continues to perform marvelously for me, and I use it all the time when I work remotely. After 7 months, I still consider this to have been my best dollar-for-dollar tech investment of 2016.

Cons: I might wish that bezel was just a bit smaller around the screen. I chose the 13" rather than the 15" because the 13" has better brightness and color definition specs. This is a really minor issue. The screen is the full advertised size, but IMO the bezel could be just a bit smaller around it.

Overall Review: Some reviewers complain about this model being lightweight and "cheaply" made. It *is* lightweight, but I think the fit and finish are actually quite good. If they made it heavier, I wouldn't want to carry it around! It could be damaged if you flex it too much. I solve that problem very neatly simply by putting it next to my laptop in the backpack so they stabilize each other. EDIT (January 2017): I bought this in May of 2016 and have carried it around in my laptop backpack almost every day since, including multiple business trips by train and by airline. I have had *zero* problems with it.

Pros: * Stable in modern games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim * Low power consumption * Easy and non-intrusive driver installation for upgrade * Good performance for its power usage and price * Quiet ball bearing fans

Cons: * Performance is not quite top-end (but, to be fair, neither is the price) * GeForce Experience doesn't always make the right settings.

Overall Review: I bought this as an upgrade to an EVGA GeForce 660 that had developed a cooling problem (?) after about 2.5 years of fairly heavy gaming use. Since I'm pretty sure the old board was failing due to a fan issue, the ball bearing fans were an attraction of this board and some of its competitors. Also, we have a 450 watt PSU, and I really didn't want to upgrade that, for both financial and ecological reasons. This board dropped right in as a replacement, and the EVGA people use the standard NVIDIA drivers and utilities, so software installation was a breeze. I tested in Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 4. In Oblivion (a 2006 vintage game), I had to manually choose settings, but the board works okay once you do that. For Skyrim, the GeForce Experience chose maxed-out quality levels and (unfortunately) picked a resolution much higher than the actual 1080p of the monitor. I manually tweaked the resolution setting but left everything else maxed, and the board runs Skyrim beautifully with plenty of headroom. For Fallout 4, GeForce Experience recommended some settings that were fairly high up in quality, but not quite maxed out. It runs okay at those settings, but there was a little lag in exterior scenes with a lot of distant grass and in interiors with extremely complex lighting. On reviewing the settings, I found that the GFE utility had set really aggressive levels for antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. I backed those off to more modest levels (around 4 samples), and pulled in the grass fade distance and item fade distance just a little (maybe 10% of the slider). Now it runs like a champ, with no perceptible lag, and I am not able to detect any cosmetic difference. This is all with highest resolution textures, ambient occlusion, and so forth. I didn't test with the new weapon debris feature that Bethesda just added to the game. It's not something I care about, and GeForce Experience recommended disabling it. I also changed the depth-of-field setting from Bokeh (GFE's recommendation) to Low, but that was a personal preference rather than a performance issue. I don't like too much DoF blurring and think Bokeh overdoes this effect. This board is rock-solid stable in Fallout 4 with the settings I've chosen. No crashes after about 8 hours of gameplay, and my old board was crashing FO4 about every 20 minutes. Although this board's performance isn't quite what I have heard people get from the higher-end boards, I'm quite satisfied with it as a good value for the price. I didn't have to break the budget to buy this one, and it consumes less power than my old board, so no PSU upgrade was needed either -- and my carbon footprint will be a little smaller. If you want to run on a 4K monitor or you demand the absolute highest FPS at fully maxed settings, this isn't the board for you. If you want a decent and stable, energy efficient board for a modest price, this seems to be a good choice based on my experience so far.

Pros: These cables are very sturdy, with a durable outer jacket. We have cats, and these will be much less prone to being bitten in two.

Cons: Because of the tougher outer jacket, these HDMI cables are not as thin and flexible as some others.

Overall Review: For my application, these are ideal because I needed durable cables with quality connectors. Thin and flexible were not criteria that mattered to me. Thus, I'm very happy with these cables, and I feel they were a good value for the price.

Pros: These are low-priced, mechanically compact, and work well. I am using two of them (different locations) with a Google Nexus 5 phone. I'm thinking about ordering a couple more of them for other sites in my home. Another nice feature is that they have two downstream USB charging ports that you can use with devices that don't yet support the QI wireless charging standard.

Cons: This item drop-shipped from China and took a couple of weeks to arrive. I was not surprised or upset about this, because it was made clear to me during the ordering process, but it's something to note if you need a charger in a hurry.

Pros: Flawless reliability, fast performance, easy installation

Cons: Higher unit cost per byte than magnetic media

Overall Review: I put this into service about a year ago as the boot drive for a server, and it has Just Worked. No data errors whatsoever. The server boot time decreased from about 45 seconds to about 10 seconds, under Debian Linux.