Pros: The board appears well-built, it has connectors for anything and everything, the northbridge and power components have a heat pipe, and it can handle two double-height GPUs. It comes with IDE, floppy, and SATA cables (4 of the latter), and the manual is pretty thorough. Gigabyte tech support was easy to contact and helpful.

Cons: As other reviewers have noted, you need to upgrade the BIOS from f3 to f5 if you wish to use a Phenom chip in this board. On Linux, you'll probably want to make a DOS boot CD, search for "FDOEM.144" and follow the instructions. If you don't upgrade the BIOS, the machine will still work (with a Phenom 9850), but under full load will heat up (sensors read 64C) and spontaneously reboot. With the BIOS upgrade, my Phenom has run for 3 weeks straight under foll load. In addition, the arrangement of the cooling fins over the heat pipe might require a different fan to keep cool. The stock fan blows air out in only two opposite directions, but to cover both ends of the heat pipe, air needs to emit from the CPU cooler in two adjacent directions (90 degrees apart) . A circular blowdown fan like the Blue Orb works.

Pros: Cools the drive down quite well. Inexpensive.

Cons: Makes lots of noise for first half hour until it warms up. And it's getting worse.

Overall Review: Buy the Scythe SCIT-1000 instead. Twice the price, but silent and just as effective.

Pros: Sexy case. Comes with a power supply and CPU water cooler - so consider that when you see the price. Packaged well. Solid construction. Panels are easy to remove and replace. Good documentation. Fits a decent-length dual-slot GPU.

Cons: It is *tight*, and maybe a bit heavy. I was worried when I finally closed the panel with the heat exchanger, as the water cooling tubes were stiff and gave me some resistance. It went well, but had me scared.

Overall Review: This is the computer case to get when you don't need to show off all your fancy components, but do want a computer that looks a bit less like a computer. I buy this case for generative art installations - it's the only computer case that I found that looks like it belongs in a gallery.

Pros: Fast, fast, fast. Tops all of my personal benchmarks, beating a 16-core top-end CPU from the competition. For my workloads (heavy math, AVX2, multithreaded), this is the best performance I've seen yet. And if history is any experience, I'll get a decade of reliable service out of this thing.

Cons: Sure, it's a little expensive, but not considering the performance that you get. I am sure a Threadripper would beat it, but I don't have that kind of money. No cons I can think of.

Overall Review: Don't just compare GHz and core count to other CPUs - these Zen 2 cores have more floating-point capability than earlier Zen (1, 1+) cores by a wide margin. And the upcoming Zen 3 isn't adding more capability in that regard. I am actually considering getting a second one, so my backup desktop is as awesome.

Pros: Laptop is LIGHT---I love it. The case nonetheless feels solid, it has four USB 3 ports, a nice Maxwell GPU, HDMI *and* VGA outputs. And for being this powerful and light-weight, the price is great.

Cons: I'm not sure what Windows 8.1 is doing, but every now and then the fans just spin up and make noise for a minute or two---that doesn't happen on Linux. Haven't figured out how to disable Optimus, so Oculus Rift demos are dog-slow. With a nice GPU like the GTX 965 in this thing, why on earth would I want to use integrated graphics? Also I'm having problems getting NVIDIA drivers to work on the Linux---all I get is a black screen when I try to boot into runlevel 5. This prevents me from using CUDA for computation, which is the real reason I bought this laptop. Also, on the Windows side, the wifi fails every time I restore from hibernation, the only solution being to let Windows "troubleshoot" the problem, which it reliably fixes, but it's a PITA and I expected better from Microsoft. The keyboard sounds cheap; I hear subtle jingly high-pitched sounds on every keystroke. Finally, the power brick is pretty big.

Overall Review: Purchased because it was the lightest and smallest laptop with a decent Maxwell GPU. I made space on the main drive inside Win8.1, turned off secure boot, set the BIOS to use Legacy Boot, and then installed Fedora 21 from USB. There was some weeping and gnashing of teeth about how Fedora wanted a GPT partition table, but it relented and let me install. Now I'm stuck trying to get the NVIDIA proprietary drivers to work so that I can do some real work with CUDA.

Pros: I don't play games with my GPUs, I run custom physics computations on them. In that respect, this card is excellent. My codes can achieve about 3.6 TFlop/s performance out of a theoretical maximum of just under 5 TFlop/s. I've been running the latest simulation for over a month at ~30% load (full-on for 30% of the time), with no crashes. Maxwell GPU chips have terrific power consumption and support all of the latest features of CUDA.

Cons: The only difficulty that I experienced was getting the NVIDIA+CUDA drivers installed and working on Fedora 21.

Overall Review: I bought this card because it supported CUDA (in which a significant amount of available high-performance code is written) and had excellent single-precision compute performance per Watt. This is paired with a Corsair water-cooled i7-5960X CPU in my main computer, and the combination is awesome.