Pros: This thing is huge. The matte screen is nice, The black brushed aluminum is very professional-looking, and will do wonders to dissipate heat, hopefully. The keys are all backlit with a red LED that looks incredibly sharp, and the ASUS ROG logo on the lid of the laptop lights up in the dark as well. All in all it's incredibly sleek. This laptop has double the ram of most standard commercial laptops, a humongous 1TB hard drive, and an optical drive for those of us who are required to work with optical media still.This is something that annoys me about other performance laptops is that more of them are ditching optical drives entirely. Not that you can't just purchase an external USB optical drive, but I consider it a nice-to-have feature in this laptop. It's also nice to know that the laptop comes with a 1-year warranty from ASUS and that includes an accident warranty. Very nice; bigger laptop brands don't normally including the accidental damage warranty. The Processor and the GTX 860m are remarkably powerful for the purpose this laptop will serve (see other thoughts)

Cons: This thing _is_ huge. a bit over 5 lbs. and while you may think that isn't much, for a laptop, it certainly is. I bought this laptop knowing this already, so I can't really deduct anything for it; I knew what I was getting in to. Since it's a performance laptop, you won't be getting great battery life out of it; the battery (thankfully replaceable, unlike other, more expensive aluminum laptops I can think of) is 100% replaceable, but bear in mind it's only a 6-cell L-ION battery. Again, I knew what I was getting in to and can't really deduct eggs for it.

Overall Review: This laptop was meant as a replacement for my wife's rapidly aging dual-core laptop with 3gbs of ram in Total. she does play video games, and she does a lot of work with optical media and would appreciate a system with a massive hard drive. SSD would have been nice, but there's no way you're cramming an SSD, 1TB hdd and an optical drive into a single laptop without it being even bigger and heavier. The bottom line is that I wanted to give her something with reasonable gaming performance, at a reasonable price. ASUS has never failed me in the past, so I found it to be the only logical choice, considering it had everything we were looking for. This laptop is sleek, the screen is nice and huge, and somehow we got it on sale for close to 1k out the door. BIG UPS to ASUS for making the ROG series sexy, multi-purpose powerhouses.

Pros: Very effective. Awesome that you can fit two drives in a single 3.5" drive bay. I love that.

Cons: If you have angled SATA cables (e.g. the ones that have the connector at a perfect right angle) you'll only be able to use it on a single drive in the two drive mounting kit. I can't fault icy dock for that, and I kinda figured that'd be an issue. Good thing I had tons of SATA cables laying around :)

Overall Review: If you're on the fence, buy it. It's awesome.

Pros: I have two of these sitting the new computer I've built right now. Haven't even installed windows yet to put them through their paces. A thought comes to mind. I now have as much video memory in these two cards as I have RAM in the computer I'm typing this review out on (its predecessor). I can't wait to torture these things with password cracking software and the most brutal games on the market... I'll check back when I get a chance to play with them.

Cons: Nothing significant other than... these things were pricey! I wanted hardware that I knew would last for years though and EVGA never fails to satisfy.

Pros: This case is a dream to work with. It has an interesting two-tier design, where the motherboard sits on the upper level, while the PSU, the drive bays, and the cable management for the PSU sit on the lower level. My bottom level looks like something power-cable Cthulu coughed up, but better down here than up on the motherboard blocking airflow. If you're worried about clearance of performance video cards or after-market HSFs, No worries! I have two GTX 980s stuffed in this case along with the Cooler Master hyper 212 evo HSF stuffed into this case with no hassle whatsoever.

Cons: I wish the case would have come with another hard drive mounting bracket for the hard drive caddie (not the bays in the front, but the cage inside the case). It's weird that there's two slots there, but only one drive caddie. Made no sense to me. Not enough to take away an egg, but food for thought. (if you have SSDs, either mount them in the drive cages up front, or get a second SSD mounting kit for mounting the SSDs internally)

Overall Review: What _is_ interesting though are the 3.5" drive bays towards the front. There's some sort of daughterboard that you connect your (up to 2) SATA data cables to and connect only one SATA power connector to in order to power both drives. It's interesting and a nice-to-have feature, kinda fitting into the whole 'test bench' thing, but mostly pointless.

Pros: CPU gets direct contact to copper pipes; the aluminum fins allow efficient radiation of heat, and the huge 120mm fan (which is very easy to adjust, remove and replace) allows for great air flow.

Cons: I can't know if this is due to a lack of experience in installing after-market HSFs (first after-market non-stock HSF I've ever messed with), but I had all sorts of fun and trouble mounting it. Note that this should be one of the first things you install on your motherboard, and that you should install it BEFORE mounting it in your case. I wasn't aware that the mounting plate under the case had to be in place in order for the mounting screws to be installed properly. Had to unmount the entire board to fix that. The nuts that mount to the screws underneath the motherboard can't hold the stand-offs tight enough. I tried to remedy that with elbow grease, and I damaged my board slightly... Thankfully, the board still seems to work. Be. Careful. the HSF, even after screwing in the X bracket moves back and forth ever so slightly. I can't tighten it anymore, otherwise I risk damaging the board, and there's nothing to really stop it from sliding left/right. I would have wished for a better way to secure the HSF in place, maybe a better locking mechanism with the X bracket? Took away an egg for this. Was worried my board was ruined the entire time I was doing the build.

Overall Review: Worth the effort. Extremely effective airflow at an affordable price.

Pros: IPMI, dual integrated Intel GigE, LSI and Intel integrated RAID, support for up to 32GB of RAM in a mini-atx board? do want.

Cons: Initially had problems with RAM not working with this board. Bear in mind if you purchase this board, you need to use ECC Unbuffered RAM, ECC Registered will _NOT_ work with this board. I bought two 16GB kits of kingston ECC registered RAM and I got BIOS beep codes indicating there was no RAM available. Lovely. Had to RMA it, pay restocking and get unbuffered. Would have liked to know what kind of RAM was compatible with this board prior to doing that. Went to kingston's memory compatibility site and eventually found that this board requires unbuffered ECC RAM if you want to do ECC on this board. Software RAID is acting wonky with ESXi. The board is compatible with ESXi, but I'm having a hard time getting my dual terabyte seagate barracudas to make a RAID 1 that ESXi can use. ESXi just sees a bunch of disks (JBOD). Will update if I figure out what's wrong here or if the onboard RAID just doesn't work with ESXi 5

Overall Review: pay attention to what RAM the board requires to work. I'm an IT guy through and through, but I made a rookie mistake, and so can you if you don't pay attention.