Pros: Cheap price (at least compared to other brands i suppose) Pretty fast for a spinner.. Benchmarks more then 2x faster then the seagate 10th gen it replaced in my system.

Cons: That noise... as others have posted about here and all over the web (esp. on seagate forums). I read that FW update fixed it, but as i later read and found out myself, not completely true... When idle the drive makes a little noise every couple of minutes and the load/unload cycle count climbs everytime there is this noise. Seems to be the APM setting, its too low or its just too dumb.. I now use hdparm to set the APM to a higher value or turn it off when I login to windows. Got rid of the noise and the insane cycle count increases. Kind of annoying that this has been a long standing issue and seagate could just release a FW update that changes the APM setting, instead they seem to be ignoring it.

Overall Review: I still am happy with the drive but the issue described in the 'cons' section is a bit annoying but not a HUGE issue to resolve on my own (even tho I shouldnt have to!)... Maybe its not really a 'bad' thing... and maybe some people wouldnt care... but I find it annoying, and seemingly abnormal compared to my experience with every other HDD ive owned. I was planning on getting a 2 or 3tb version to use externally but I might wait it out instead and see what the future brings either with this drive or the next gen.

Pros: Decent price after sale & rebate Graphical Bios Has normal PCI slots 4x SATA II & 4x SATA III ports Lots of USB 3.0 & 2.0 ports ..Bunch of other features, etc..

Cons: Well it must just be bad luck because Ive had nothing but issues with this board since day one (Ive had it almost a week hoping to resolve issues with no luck so far) - At least once a day my PSU will just shut off under stock settings (while idle/light load) and my case power button wont work unless I turn the PSU switch off then back on. PSU works fine with 2 other boards so I doubt its the PSU itself. - Temp sensors act up on a regular basis. CPU temp will get stuck at 40C and wont change unless I reboot. Motherboard temp will just disappear or start reading -1C until I reboot. - PCI slot seems funky... Im using a PCI sound card and when the card is seated in the slot all the way, the back panel bracket doesnt line up with the case so it cant be secured to the case. Which results in my pc locking up whenever I try to plug/unplug a cable from it or if the wires get hit (any little movement of the card I guess causes the pc to lock up). If i Screw it into the case it pulls part of the card out of the slot and the card doesnt show up in windows. Ive used 2 other boards in this case and neither had this problem so I doubt its the card/case thats causing this. Taking the board out of the case to reseat everything in hopes of that solving some issues made no difference and I also noticed that the board doesnt seem to be flat, seems to be slightly warped or something so maybe thats why the PCI card doesnt seem to line up properly with the back of the case - Some bios settings keep changing on their own. Even after I continue to reset them back to default, when I go back into the bios later I see that they have once again reverted back to non-default settings.

Overall Review: Starting to feel like an RMA is going to be my only option. But after contacting ASUS support, I was told that if the board will not POST to go to the RMA website and request one. Thing is the board does POST, so I feel like the email response was just a generic response that wasnt really about what I sent to them. And was that them saying I can only RMA the board if it wont POST?? On a side note, their website is awful.. For a big company I cant believe how incredibly slow their website is and how many links either go nowhere or they go to the completely wrong pages. I might be better off trying to call them and talking to a real person in real-time.. But I really dont want to deal with RMAing as about a month ago I had to RMA a board from one of my other builds (different company tho) and Im still waiting to get that back (which is basically why I built this system instead of going without a computer for even longer) so RMAing in general has left a bad impression on me. Not to mention I wouldnt be surprised if i have to ship this board out first AND pay for shipping, resulting in my not having a PC and also it costing me more to get a board that functions properly Very frustrating to say the least, especially after hearing good things about ASUS and leaving the other brand I always used to try them. Not that its specifically their fault, cant totally blame them for every problem on stuff that is mass produced.

Pros: Nothing too special, I mean its just a surge protector.. BUT in saying that, the rotating outlets is a pretty cool feature. It makes wire/plug management a tiny bit cleaner looking. What else is there to say about a surge protector?

Cons: As for the product, nothing negative that I can think of that actually effects me (the lack of an RJ-45 port doesnt matter to me as I wouldn't use it anyway) As for the rebate, look read the 'other' section...

Overall Review: Not directly connected to the product itself but still worth a mention.. The Rebate.... Having the mail in rebate was basically the deciding factor on me choosing this item instead of a couple others I was looking at. Now after the fact I found that this rebate company has a track record (via google search) of not paying out rebates and screwing people over. I had another item that it took nearly a year (they had said 4-7 weeks lol) for the rebate card to arrive. BUT this time I was completely denied the rebate. The reason given was that I did not include the invoice/receipt for the purchase. Yet on my account on the rebate website they host a PDF file with images of the contents that I had mailed to them and sure enough there is a picture of the invoice that they claim I did not send. Trying to contact their support was a major hassle (phone only) and then all I got out of it was generic responses that they are probably told to tell anyone that calls, their answers had nothing to do with my questions or my situation what so ever. So basically the rebate that was the final deciding factor in this purchase was more or less a scam. It was only like $6 or $8 (dont recall exactly) so it is not a big loss or anything, just really annoying especially when the rebate company is actually hosting images on their website showing that they received the exact thing they claim I did not send them.

Pros: Huge upgrade from my old router. Pretty decent interface, although I don't use very many of the features but everything I have used has worked flawlessly. The wifi seems to have pretty decent strength and range and havent had any issues with it. Using it for 2 wired connections, one to my main PC and the other to a server. The server has it's own modem so I like the ease of blocking the internet to specific devices on the router, allowing me to easily add the server to the local network without affecting its dedicated internet access. Wifi has worked great for 2x samsung TVs, my cell phone, and a firestick

Cons: After owning it for just over a year I cant really think of any cons.. I guess there is that it is sort of large (but most routers are now days). The biggest con I suppose would be the rebate situation, although that is not directly connected to the actual product itself. If I recall, I believe it had said you will receive the rebate in 4-7 weeks. After 6 months I gave up hope, but to my surprise it randomly showed up after 9-10 months.

Overall Review: After moving and leaving my old router with my ex girlfriend I had been using a belkin N300 router for quite a period of time (yup, basically junk lol). Finally got around to pulling the trigger on a new router and have been very pleased with selecting this one. Sure there is routers that are surely better then this and more powerful (and more expensive!), but for my application this one has been wonderful and I have been very pleased with it.

Pros: Just upgraded from the 2x4gb kit of the same speed/timings.. Ran memtest overnight on them, no errors on any passes. I ran the 2x4gb kit with slightly tighter then XMP2 timings at the stock 1.5v, but so far with this new kit Ive only bothered to change the command rate to 1T... Wouldnt have upgraded to a larger sized kit of the same ram if I wasnt happy with them, not much else to say....

Cons: None at all

Overall Review: When I built my current system a few years ago, I should have got 16gb of RAM then, but 8gb did work well for me for a while. More recently Ive been doing stuff that loves ram and I was easily maxing out my 8gb at times. So I waited a short bit of time till this ram went on sale and grabbed it. Definite improvements in situations where 8gb wasnt enough. And I'll have no trouble selling my 2x4gb kit, making this upgrade even cheaper for me Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V Pro CPU: Intel i7 2600k @ 4.6ghz RAM: 2x8gb G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1866 (9-10-9-28 1T) GPU: EVGA GTX 970 FTW+ PSU: Thermaltake SP-850M (850w) Audio: Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro 5.1 (PCI) SSD: Samsung 840 EVO 120gb HDD: 11+ TB (WD & Seagate) Monitor1: Samsung S27D590 (27" @ 1080p HDMI) Monitor2: Viewsonic VG2230 (22" @ 1680x1050 DVI) Mouse: Logitech MX518 Keyboard: Razer Lycosa OS: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

Pros: Fast, cheap, etc (you know the drill...)

Cons: This drive had been working like a champ, holding about 2.7tb (i think.. there was about 12-15% free space usually left) of videos that I used for streaming to my TV via Serviio. It got pretty minimal usage (for the most part, only used if I was watching a video on my tv from it). I also ran hdparm to turn off the APM to disable the constant head parking/chirping noise and that should have decreased the 'wear and tear' on the drive as well. Then all of a sudden one day Serviio would not stay connected for more then a few minutes. Noticed after that the drive would randomly disappear from the computer and reappear a minute or two later, usually would not show in the bios, and the pc itself took way longer to bootup. Chkdsk refused to complete (last stage stuck at 10% for over 8 hours). SMART data would usually return either just blank entries or random garbage characters. When it did give me some actual SMART data, half the entries would say something about the age limit being reached (i dont even understand what that means). Compared to all my other drives (some seagate as well and some over 10 years old), my other drives have way more hours and data transfer amounts then this drive and they all still work fine. Im guessing the problem might have to do with bad sectors as thats a common issue i suppose. Plus if I run O&O defrag it shows one file on the drive that is fragmented and it cant defrag it, and if I try to view that video file it freezes up my PC about half way through (the file used to work fine if you are wondering)

Overall Review: While im well aware of the issues seagate (and really, all HDD manufacturers) have been having with their drives over the past few years, I thought I was going to be ok since most people reported issues within the first couple of months. Plus Ive never had any issues with my other seagate drives. I guess I might still be lucky that the drive wasnt just all of a sudden dead one day, and I can still access and hopefully will be able to save at least most of whats on the drive when my new one comes in (replaced it with a 4tb WD Red). Until then I have the drive disconnected to hopefully avoid the problems getting worse. Its been suggested that a full format and another attempt at error checking/repair might resolve the issue with the drive (i have my doubts) but even if it appears to do that, I can no longer trust this drive with any data so it is basically junk now Even with the well known seagate issues lately (well more then lately i guess), I was still a seagate supporter as the several seagate drives I have had been working great until this one incident. But I think its time for me to branch out and see what results I get from other manufacturers