Pros: Great board, awesome feature set, low price, super-reliable, great over-clocker

Cons: Uses the ALC 888b chip for audio, which is a problem if you intend to build a Snow Leopard Hackintosh.

Overall Review: The ALC 888b audio chip onboard this puppy is no longer supported by OSX as of update 10.6.3. As a result, you have to do some non-vanilla stuff to get it working again. If you're just ordering your parts to build a "Hack Pro", consider the GA-P55M-UD4 instead, which has the ALC889a, which is still fully supported by 10.6.3.

Pros: Small, efficient, somewhat quiet. Powerful enough for HTPC.

Cons: Very poor product description lead me to try and build a system using this board and 1333Mhz DDR3. The manual clearly states it supports 1066Mhz DDR3 ONLY. Newegg's fecally-infused description contains: DDR3 1066/1333 (OC) Which is fine if you know to interpret this as "Supports DDR3 1066Mhz RAM that can then be overclocked TO 1333Mhz." To me, that says "It supports 1066Mhz, 1333Mhz, and can be overclocked."

Overall Review: I've been building systems for 17 years, and I was easily able to identify the reason the system wouldn't boot with 1333Mhz DDR3 installed, but will everyone?? How much hassle could be saved by spending 15 seconds and writing 10 more words on the RAM supported.

Pros: Thin and light, perfect size for holding with one hand (portrait) and gaming with two hands (landscape). Screen is more vibrant and provides truer colors than the iPad Mini Retina. Higher PPI than iPad Mini Retina. Better battery life than iPad Mini Retina (with same actual brightness in nits). **See other thoughts** Great Newegg service, as always.

Cons: Bought it and 4 days later Newegg dropped the price $20. They were good to me and sent me a $20 gift card, but then I found it brand new from a reputable fleabay store for *another* $20 cheaper ($40 cheaper than what I paid). Now, $20 isn't going to break me, but I'm also not going to waste it senselessly. As for the device, the buttons are very flush with the surface, making it a tad difficult to find them if you wrap this thing in any kind of a case.

Overall Review: Many review sites say the iPad Mini Retina has better battery life, but their tests are all done at "75% brightness". Well, that is skewed by default since the Nexus 7 is between 200 and 300 nits brighter than the iPad Mini Retina at the same percentage. If you actually were to match them nit for nit, you'd end up with better battery life by about 30 minutes on the Nexus 7. The "app gap" between iOS and Android is almost completely gone, however more apps are released for free on iOS. Then again, try doing something simple like copying an eBook down from your NAS onto the iPad. Insanely complicated compared to how easily this is done (for free and without a computer) on the N7.

Pros: Fast, supports XMP, quad-channel, lots of capacity.

Cons: The first set had legitimate errors, uncovered by Memtest86+ via bootable USB key. The replacement set after RMA has been rock solid, and error free. Ubuntu's install of memtest86+ from GRUB has a bug that caused me to mis-diagnose the second set of RAM as faulty. See other thoughts.

Overall Review: I'm using the Gigabyte GA-x79-UD5 motherboard with a Noctua cooler for the i7-3930k CPU. I set the BIOS to warn on CPU fan failure. Because of the low RPMs of the 2 fans on this cooler, and because only one fan is hooked up to the CPU fan lead on the motherboard, the BIOS detects this as a failed CPU fan, and prevents the system from resuming from sleep each and every time (3 long beeps, followed by reboot, followed by 1 long beep and 45 short beeps). This drove me crazy troubleshooting since Gigabyte provides zero info about this beep code. What is sleep other than caching of RAM contents to disk, and then soft power off. So I made the guess that the system was having problems resuming because it couldn't restore info from the disk to the RAM. Ok, so I troubleshot the drives by pulling them out one-by-one, moving them to different controllers/channels. Still got the error and beep codes. Next step was to test the RAM. I had recently installed Mint 14.1, which is based on Ubuntu 12.10, and includes Memtest86+ that can be booted into from GRUB. The problem is that there is a known bug with this version of Memtest86+ that causes it to throw false positives on test #7 regardless of the RAM being tested. It *says* that it is Memtest86+ version 4.20, but it must make use of something in the Ubuntu build because it only fails from this version. When I boot into the latest UBCD 5.11 or from the Memtest86+ image from their website, the tests all pass with flying colors on known good RAM that I had lying around. So I tested this quad-channel kit again with the stand-alone memtest86+ and voila! it passed just fine after about 22 hours of non-stop testing. I'm giving this product 5 eggs to balance against my last review which was 1 egg. The first set was bad, so I feel that's legit. Newegg was awesome, and even offered to RMA the second set. The moral of the story: DON'T BLINDLY TRUST YOUR TOOLS. Software tools can be wrong sometimes. Double-check it with a second set of tools.

Pros: 32GB quad-channel. That's literally it.

Cons: First set I got caused random BSODs in Windows. Ran Memtest86+ and uncovered errors in one of the 4 sticks, but because it's a quad-channel kit, had to send back the whole set. RMA'd to Newegg who promptly shipped me a replacement set. Second set has a new host of errors, not sure in which stick, but have to RMA a second time. Also, I have a Noctua cooler for my i7-3930k in this case, using the Gigabyte GA-x79-UD5 and with these stupid gaudy heatsinks it is a huge PITA to change out the sticks, usually involving removing one of the fans from the Noctua cooler in order to seat the RAM.

Overall Review: Next time I'll spend an extra few bucks for low profile RAM from a company that actually cares about quality control.

Pros: Great performance in Windows 7** (see Other Thoughts), uses synchronous NAND and has been rock solid for me.

Cons: Does not play nice with the SATA III controller in my Late 2011 MacBook Pro. Using various disk testing utilities (Black Magic and others), I was able to determine that this drive is only getting 140MB/s write and around 440MB/s read. That's not even close to advertised write speeds. Other SSD manufacturers guarantee that their drives are Mac compatible, namely Oh-Dubya-See and P*triot.

Overall Review: First, Macs arbitrarily limit the speed of SSDs in Boot Camp by preventing Windows 7 from using the drive in AHCI mode. There are (unreliable) workarounds with registry hacks and modified MBR boot loaders, but what a PITA. Second, the SATA III controller in current-gen MBPs is apparently very picky. I really wish I'd known this before spending so much on this drive. I could have basically bought a slower but larger SATA II drive and gotten the same effective results (or better in case of write-intensive applications).