Pros: - Dual Ethernet controllers, with teaming! - x16/x16 or x8/x8/x8/x8 PCIe 3 lanes for SLI and Crossfire! - PCIe lanes divide separately for each x16 slot. Allowing x16/x8/x8. - Entire I/O panel is USB 3. - Two USB 3 headers. - PS2 mouse/keyboard Compatibility. - Overclocks like a champ. - sata power adapter for extra stability in SLI and Crossfire. - Post code reader. - PCI slot. - Comes with a great WiFi/Bluetooth card.

Cons: - More current drivers are not available on website. - UEFI Bios completely inverts my Razer Death Adder 3.5G. - Provided drivers can be unstable or dysfunctional. - Colors of LEDs do not match the actual board's color scheme. - Has not received BIOS updates in many months. - First x16 PCIe slot is too close to the CPU to fit a PH-TC14PE with a Graphics Card. - Only 2 USB 2 headers, which isn't much. - Odd inclusion of 2 extra 1394 headers, a con since there's only two USB 2 headers.

Overall Review: This board's biggest problem for me is the completely inverted mouse in the BIOS screen. Otherwise, it's as close to the perfect Z77 board as you can get. It's clearly labelled, well laid out, bursting with incredible features, and has proven to be a solid and stable overclocking platform. This really is an excellent product. My biggest complaint, however, is the difficulty of acquiring drivers for this beast. To put it simply, you'll need to scour the web for the newest drivers, Gigabyte doesn't have them. Right now there's an updated USB 3 driver available through Intel's website which fixed several device compatibility issues I was having. One of them in particular was an issue with properly identifying my Xbox 360 controller on USB 3 ports. There's a new rapid storage controller driver available as well, in addition to other drivers I'm sure I haven't stumbled across yet. Also, while the Gigabyte website claims teaming in unavailable on the Ethernet ports, the newest Intel drivers (18.4 as of this review) fully support it. I'm using a load balancing team to write this very review. That's not all either, Gigabyte's e2200 driver for Windows 7 x64 is woefully out of date, and has many stability issues. Much newer drivers are available for this device on Killer's website, and are almost certainly a requirement just to stop BSODs and other connectivity problems. However, once you figure out where to look for drivers this board really is something incredible to behold. It is easily one of the best boards of the Z77 lineup, and arguably one of the best boards for the 1155 socket. If Gigabyte's website would update to include the better drivers that are available, and if they ironed out the few kinks in the UEFI BIOS, the experience of owning this board would be much more enjoyable. As it stands though, Gigabyte has one thoroughly satisfied customer! Rig Specs: i7 3770K @ 4.5 GHz G1.Sniper 3 G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 2400MHz EVGA GTX 680 FTW+ 4GB w/Backplate EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified Ultra Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200RPM HDD 1200w Thermaltake Toughpower Grand Kraken x60 ASUS 24X DVD Burner CM Storm Stryker

Pros: - Faster than AMD. - Faster than most other Intel chips. - Lots of impressive instructions sets. - Hyper-Threading is much improved over the original Pentium 4 implementations. - K series chips like this one have unlocked multipliers needed for overclocking.

Cons: - Way too expensive for what it is. - Poor overclocking performance from voltage limits (not thermally limited) - Only 4 actual execution cores. - Tacked on / forced on-board graphics chip has numerous issues. - K series chips sacrifice all Intel specific computing technologies for multiplier overclocking, making them a poor choice for non-gamers or professional users.

Overall Review: It's hard to start off with a review of this chip, as it's probably the most mixed-bag product I've ever purchased. to start with the basic positive point of this chip, it's really fast. This is currently one of the fastest processors you can buy, and if all you care about is the extra speed then you won't have any regrets. However, it's less than stellar on all other fronts. The K series chips are missing all of Intel's more impressive virtualization and related professional technologies, which would be fine if they were going for a minimalist overclocking chip. However, these CPUs have an Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics chip built right into the CPU itself. As you could very well imagine, Intel's support of this chip is generally bad. Direct Compute 5 is falsely reported as being fully compatible, which may break some programs on the DirectX level within Windows itself. The chip also reports compatibility with OpenCL 1.2, but the actual latest drivers currently only report OpenCL1.1 compatibility within their own Information Center screens, making the claim unlikely. These graphics chips also report OpenGL compatibility of 0.0, which is worrisome, and they apparently only support DirectX 11 despite 11.1 being a software-only update. Intel Quick Sync Video is a good technology on these graphics chips but, you need to have a monitor's desktop rendering on the chip to be able to use it at all so, using Quick Sync requires either a software trick in windows 7/8 or having an extra monitor to plug into the motherboard itself. Overall it's not the worst experience I've had with Intel's graphics processors, but it certainly doesn't fit a product of this caliber. Back to the processor itself, overclocking performance was poor. On my old Phenom II x4 965 overclocking performance was generally fairly linear, meaning that upping the base clock would work perfectly well at proper voltages no matter what the multiplier was. with that CPU, as long as you could stomach the heat and the power consumption the chip would be stable. The 3770k hit a solid brick wall at 4.5 GHz. Going over that, or 1.5volts on the CPU cores would create lockups and crashes. Nothing solved this, not even a Kraken x60 and very cool temps. It was just a wall that curiously did not appear in any professional reviews of the product. While I understand Intel isn't responsible for overclocking performance in their products, I found the issue concerning none the less. Overall, I can't argue with the chip's speed. It destroys every other quad core chip I've had with ease, but the chip definitely has its flaws and those flaws make it difficult to live with. If you must have the fastest quad core around, then you know what you're buying. Otherwise, look elsewhere. CPU: Intel i7 3770k RAM: 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws Z Mobo: Gigabyte G1 Sniper.3 GFX: EVGA GTX 680 FTW+ 4GB w/backplate Compute GFX: EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified Ultra PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1200watt

Pros: The so-called "professional reviewers" would have you believe that a card like this is too powerful for 1080p gaming, and that the factory overclock on the FTW doesn't make a serious difference over a cheaper card that's closer to Nvidia's reference design. Don't believe them. At 1080p the GTX 1080 blasts through the most poorly optimized PC games with absolute ease, crushing badly ported modern titles from supposedly triple A developers and humble independent offerings alike. It pushes 144 Hz computer screens extremely well, providing a staggeringly high level of smoothness for the cream of the crop G-Sync compatible pro-gaming computer monitors that are currently available on the market. The card also leverages GPU Boost 3.0 to automatically push its clock speeds higher during more difficult workloads while also intelligently dialing back clock speeds when frame-rate caps are exceeded to improve your computer's power efficiency when the full capabilities of the GPU aren't actually needed. Then there's the EVGA specific technologies on offer with this model: Full range RGB lighting across almost the entirety of the card looks great , the new ACX 3.0 cooler offers excellent performance with strong industrial styling, the fans actually stop spinning at idle to conserve that much more power, and the entire board has been customized with a superior 10 + 2 power phase design fed by two eight pin connectors offering twice as many power phases as the reference Founders Edition card. Add to that EVGA's conservative factory overclock, which can actually make a noticeable difference at 1080p with high refresh rate displays, and what's specifically on offer here becomes quite incredible for a price that's actually cheaper than the reference card. This all comes together to make a killer package that can definitely take almost anything you could possibly throw at it. Be it high refresh rate displays, 21:9 ultra wide, 4K, or the mythical realm of virtual reality, this card can actually do it all. That and with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Nvidia's Simultaneous Multi-Projection potentially offering serious performance boosts to future applications, this card might just be able to do it all for years to come.

Cons: Unfortunately, there are some downsides. Customizable RGB lighting is great in theory, but less than perfect in practice. Nvidia's drivers don't directly control it and every GPU manufacturer has their own implementation with its own proprietary software suite to drive it. For EVGA, this means downloading the entire PrecisionX OC software overclocking suite just to get your GPU to glow in a color that matches with your build. This is an acceptable if inelegant solution for those that don't necessarily want to mess with overclocking but want their RGB lighting to be properly customized. It's worth noting, however, that this solution doesn't work for people that avoid using windows as their primary OS. Really, Nvidia's Drivers or GeForce Experience software should have these RGB customization options built right in. Having per-application settings would probably be ideal. Edit: After this review was released, EVGA rolled out an update to PrecisionX OC that addressed a point I had raised in the previous paragraph about RGB color information not being saved to firmware. I've edited that section out of my review to reflect the fact that this issue has been properly addressed. Thanks to EVGA for taking suggestions and listening to feedback! Otherwise, Nvidia's driver support is becoming notorious for breaking things and causing issues. They add features with every generation, rarely keep them in good working order, and slowly abandon them after painfully clinging to them in marketing for years. Any Nvidia 3D Vision kit owner could tell you as much, but this card marks the start of Nvidia giving up on exotic SLI multi-card configurations as well. Worse, their actual driver suite, The Nvidia Control Panel, looks and feels like a piece of software from the bad side of the Windows 95 era of programming. It takes forever to open on any machine, has horribly laid out menus that scream of decades of feature bloat, is impressively unresponsive, lacks a lot of basic functionality, is somehow filled with glitches, commonly forgets or misremembers your settings, and is horribly outclassed by third party utilities like Nvidia Inspector and even their direct competition's stunningly elegant Radeon Settings Crimson Edition application. Considering how many programmers Nvidia hires, the state of their software is entirely and utterly unacceptable. If it wasn't so painful to witness and use, I would laugh. Finally, the price is just too high. The $499 GTX 480 launched in 2010 as the world's single fastest GPU and was Nvidia's flagship product of the generation. In 2016, after years of process improvements and manufacturing cost reductions, a $699 GTX 1080 plays second fiddle to the $1200 flagship "New Titan X". I don't think I'm entirely okay with that, for a whole host of reasons, but I still bought one anyway.

Overall Review: Overall, every single one of the cons that I listed can be buried by a single word: performance. This card crushes every graphically intensive program I've thrown at it. It doesn't care about the combination of settings or the amount of super sampling, it just decimates. GTA V, Doom, Metro Redux, Fallout 4, Elite Dangerous, Rainbow Six Siege, it's not bothered by any of them. Only breaking out the old 3D Vision kit for GTA V or staring down from the rooftops of Fallout 4's downtown Boston makes this thing sweat, and that's mostly just incredibly poorly optimized code. My old GTX 680 never quite felt this impressively unstoppable. The GTX 1080 is a beast with no equal, and I'm not sure if there's anything it can't do that 30% or 50% more power in a "New Titan X" would actually help it to overcome. It's just the current pinnacle, the best of the best, and this version of it looks fantastic in my rig. To those with the means and the will to acquire it, I highly recommend it.

Pros: - It does the job. - Burns and reads rather quietly and quickly.

Cons: - It doesn't play Blu-rays? Don't laugh, this is a problem if your case doesn't have a surplus of drive bays.

Overall Review: I don't have much to say about this. It's a perfectly typical multi-format burner drive. If you need a DVD drive in your machine, it's an excellent choice.

Pros: - It works. - It works really well. - It's not conductive. - It's as advertized.

Cons: - I just personally think it's a little expensive but, hey, if it works then it's worth it.

Overall Review: There's really not much to say, but what did you expect? It's thermal paste people, it's not the most complex thing in the world. That said, this stuff works very well. So if you think you need the best, go ahead and buy it. I certainly don't regret it, and I don't think my 3770k does either.

Pros: Runs Cool. Overclocks well. 4 cores for a great price. Running mine at 4GHz just with a multiplier increase. Phenom II architecture is more powerful than FX, core for core.

Cons: Really, there isn't anything bad about this CPU. Even in the face of Ivy Bridge and FX, it holds up well for real world purposes.

Overall Review: I was dubious about buying AMD after Sandy Bridge received so much praise back in 2011. But the price for those CPUs is nearly triple this guy, and the performance difference doesn't justify it. This CPU runs everything I throw at it with no problems. It can handle tons of tasks at once without slowing down at all. I can play Crysis on max settings, while live streaming, with tons of internet browsers and other applications open all at the same time and this thing barely shoots past 75% load. I don't think I'll need to upgrade this for a long time. My Comp: CPU: Phenom II x4 965 @ 4GHz RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws (2x4GB) 1333 @ 7-7-7-21 Mobo: Gigabyte GA-880GMA-USB3 GFX: EVGA 550Ti SC @ 1GHz Core, 2.5 GHz Memory HDD: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0 GB/s PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1200watt ((massive overkill.)) Case: Cooler Master Elite 330