Joined on 10/31/08
Excellent SSD
Pros: This SSD is amazing. Throw one of these in your PC and you're guaranteed to see a massive difference over a conventional hard drive. Applications load up in milliseconds after you click on them. It makes for a very fluid and fast computing experience.
Cons: The first one I received had some write issues. I would get a BSOD every time I would try to write larger files to the disk. I had to RMA the first SSD. See other thoughts for more details.
Overall Review: I contacted Patriot through their website, and they sent me the RMA papers the next day. The RMA process is exceptionally fast. Fill out a form with them on their website and they'll tell you where to send it. Their policy works like this, send it in to them, they take about 5 days to look at the drive and find a new one to you, and once they're done with that they ship it back. I got the new SSD about 3 weeks after I shipped it. It took about a week to get there, they checked it out for about 5 days, and they shipped the new one back to me. The first one was kind of a let down, but sometimes you just get a bad egg. The new replacement they gave me is working flawlessly.
Excellent RAM
Pros: Popped it into my motherboard and it works.
Cons: I had to update the motherboard's bios in order to get it working at the advertised settings, but that's not the RAM's fault.
Overall Review: Build Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @4.8Ghz MOBO: MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB @1600mhz 7-8-7-24 GPU: 2x MSI Lightning Xtreme GTX 580's in SLI Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX SSD: 240GB Patriot Wildfire HDD: 2x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 ODD: LG Blu-Ray Drive PSU: Corsair AX1200 Case: Cooler Master HAF X CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 (push/pull) IR Receiver: Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Monitor: Acer P243W (1920x1200)
Very nice case
Pros: Exceptional airflow and tons of space to work with.
Cons: The tooless hard drive mounts are kind of a pain. When installing a full sized hard drive in them, the screws that are supposed to hold them in would pop out of their housing most of the time. The rubber on the screws would move out of place, and they are very hard to get back in place. If the rubber isn't mounted on the screws correctly, the hard drive rail will either not slide in correctly or the screws will pop out in the process. It would have been easier just to screw in the hard drives manually. The dust filters are not easily removable. To get to the one on the side panel, you have to take the side fan off. That one isn't that much of a problem though if you have come canned air sitting around. The front fan filter is the most annoying though because you have to take off the front bezel in order to get to it, and you have to take off the top bezel in order to take off the front bezel. I also removed the PSU filter because I would have had to remove the PSU to clean it.
Overall Review: Build Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @4.8Ghz MOBO: MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB @1600mhz 7-8-7-24 GPU: 2x MSI Lightning Xtreme GTX 580's in SLI Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX SSD: 240GB Patriot Wildfire HDD: 2x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 ODD: LG Blu-Ray Drive PSU: Corsair AX1200 Case: Cooler Master HAF X CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 (push/pull) IR Receiver: Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Monitor: Acer P243W (1920x1200)
Absolutely Amazing
Pros: This card is absolutely amazing. I have two of them hooked up in SLI right now and overclocked. The core clock is 940mhz and the effective memory clock is set at 4400mhz. These cards together in SLI can play any game on the market without dipping below 60FPS. You could really play any game on the market with just one of these cards, but I decided to get two just to be more future proof and also to have a constant 60 or more FPS.
Cons: I can't flash the bios to overclock them further for some reason (even though that's completely unnecessary).
Overall Review: Build Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @4.8Ghz MOBO: MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB @1600mhz 7-8-7-24 GPU: 2x MSI Lightning Xtreme GTX 580's in SLI Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX SSD: 240GB Patriot Wildfire HDD: 2x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 ODD: LG Blu-Ray Drive PSU: Corsair AX1200 Case: Cooler Master HAF X CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 (push/pull) IR Receiver: Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Monitor: Acer P243W (1920x1200)
Amazing CPU
Pros: Extremely fast CPU. I was able to overclock it to 4.8Ghz. If you have any reservations about buying this CPU, just buy it already. This is probably the best bang for the buck CPU on the market right now. For around $300 you get almost the same performance as a 990X. After overclocking, I got a Cinebench score of 9.2, and a 3dMark11 CPU score of 10944.
Cons: I couldn't get it to 5Ghz, but that might be the motherboard's fault.
Overall Review: Build Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @4.8Ghz MOBO: MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB @1600mhz 7-8-7-24 GPU: 2x MSI Lightning Xtreme GTX 580's in SLI Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX SSD: 240GB Patriot Wildfire HDD: 2x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 ODD: LG Blu-Ray Drive PSU: Corsair AX1200 Case: Cooler Master HAF X CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 (push/pull) IR Receiver: Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Monitor: Acer P243W (1920x1200)
Nice Board with a Couple of Minor Frustrations
Pros: Very nice board. The main reason I chose this board over its competition is because I liked the PCI-Express slot spacing. I was able to install two graphics cards and a sound card without restricting airflow. The board also looks very nice aesthetically, and I was able to overclock my 2600K to 4.8Ghz.
Cons: If you're buying this board and hoping to overclock, then you're definitely going to want to update the bios. The bios version that comes with the board is absolutely horrible. I couldn't overclock at all with the original bios because it wouldn't allow me to change the multiplier. Updating the bios was also a task in and of itself. Most of the utilities that the board comes with to update the bios don't work (or at least they didn't with bios version 1.2). I was finally able to update it through MSI's Live Update Utility after everything else had failed. After updating the bios to version 1.5, everything worked flawlessly though. The only other con I have with this board is that for whatever reason it doesn't like to go into sleep mode. It takes longer for my computer to recover from sleep mode than it does to boot. I don't know if that's the motherboard's fault or something else. That's really a minor inconvenience though since I have an SSD.
Overall Review: Build Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @4.8Ghz MOBO: MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB @1600mhz 7-8-7-24 GPU: 2x MSI Lightning Xtreme GTX 580's in SLI Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX SSD: 240GB Patriot Wildfire HDD: 2x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 ODD: LG Blu-Ray Drive PSU: Corsair AX1200 Case: Cooler Master HAF X CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 (push/pull) IR Receiver: Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Monitor: Acer P243W (1920x1200)