Pros: Plug and play like nvidia always intended. unlocked voltage control. great overclock headroom. Really low temps. vram wall is miles away. after OCs you mite as well call it the 680 Lightning Xtreme edition.

Cons: theres really only one con with these cards. its due to the great cooling. the heatsink plate is a hair too close to the SLI connectors in which you wont be able use a normal 3-way SLI bridge, unless you can find a high profile one(evga may have, havnt looked tho) however it is very easy to use 2 2-way SLI bridges to accomplish this. not worth docking an egg for this IMO

Overall Review: Crysis 3 had me itching for an upgrade from my 570 and these really hit the spot. i was struggling with memory usage and overall raw performance of the GPUs. if your only playing at 1080p or less, these cards arnt really a necessity, from a 570/580/6950/6970 its not really an appropriate upgrade, but from a 400 series or 5000 series its massive. picked up two and running in SLI, both overclocked beyond 1200 mhz on stock voltage. never over 60c on full load cept in 3dmark11. both idle between 29-33c

Pros: High Memory, Solid Quality, Great Warranty, High OCs on stock Voltages, Reasonable Cooling(see Other Thoughts). I honestly hold MSI to a higher standard than EVGA, sapphire, Gigabyte. may not have the longest warranty but they will honor their product till the last hour.

Cons: MSI makes fantastic graphics cards, so i dont hold them to the weak points on this particular card. Software support(on this being AMD's flagship GPU) is utterly disappointing. Crossfire requires you to tweak profiles to maintain reasonable temps on the slave card, and even though you get 3gbs of VRAM you will hit the wall on games at 1080p with the high res texture packs. microstutter issues result in random game crashes and red screens while the heating issues will cause your top card to reach 60 c on idle and the stock fan settings will allow it to do so without reving the fan. when the temp sensor finally gets up to bring the temps back down sounds like your taking off in an f16 with the windows down.

Overall Review: i had gone back and fourth to 7970 and 4gb 680 and though they both hold their own, AMD just dosnt seem to have their R and D or their prioritys in order. both offer 3d, but good luck finding a monitor for the AMD side. both have high VRAM, but it seems you can hit the wall real quick with 3gbs and high sample rates. power and cooling goes to nvidia, and in the end, your not going to have to downclock your 680 in SLI to keep the slave card cool. the 7970 CF setup would idle at 61c with all fans installed on my 810 switch.

Pros: Fast, Price (got this for $80 during newegg's summer deals), Customer support, more than enough space. Dosnt use the sandforce controller.

Cons: the price is still over a dollar per GB but its not a surprise really. firmware bug, but seems crucial is already working it, and believes they have a fix. no TRIM.

Overall Review: after you optomize your drives windows 7 shouldnt take up more than 15 gbs which gives you plenty of room to add some of your fav software to the SSD, highly recomend getting an additional storage device to store games and other software on.

Pros: Good warranty and customer support

Cons: for the price your better off getting a different psu, this may be a modular psu, but it dosnt come stock with enough connectors, IE if you SLI or Xfire two higher end GPUs then you wont have a connector for your pciex1 cards etc. and given that all the information is clearly listed its not worth getting a PSU that will only be compatable with the few cases that antec releases for it. also max power isnt 1000w closer to the 850w range. drop of eggs is for the overall value of it.

Overall Review: your better off spending a little more money on an 80 plus gold psu that can actually come close to providing the power it says it will

Pros: easily overclocks past the MSI LE specs. more or less a reference design(my koolance nx-580s fit on these perfectly with the EVGA backplate). lifetime warranty and 24/7 customer support. great for surround gaming in SLI(metro 2033 will easily consume 2GB) and dont expect game manufacturers to start tuning there games down(BF3 will probably have the same kind of memory usage EA has stated that they wont tune the computer version down like they did for the consoles, and 64 player online matches as aposed to the 32 player console version). both of mine run pretty cool in a single loop with my 2600k, but thats to be expected with the waterblocks i bought.

Cons: price, but you get what you pay for(no star deduction). i dont know why EVGA boosted the VRAM and kept all of the clocks at the reference level. for the $10 less than the MSI L XE you should get a little more of a boost. what happened to the EVGA black SLI bridges (no star deduction) seriously the only way you can find them is used, or making a custom one.

Overall Review: 2 of these in SLI are amazing for surround gaming. ive got these on a MSI z68a-gd80 and i love it. dont forget to register your cards with EVGA within 30 days of purchase to get your lifetime warranty.

Pros: Extremely fast. Hyper Threading. Lots of overclocking headroom. great for encoding and gaming.

Cons: stock fan and heatsink, and if you bought the K model(someone plans on overclocking, hmm?) and expected to keep your stock cooler on it, shame on you. price, but the only place ive seen this cheaper is used and at a store that has pretty limited locations and dosnt ship to private addresses

Overall Review: if you plan on gaming several places have confirmed that your CPU can be a pretty serious bottleneck. not on all games but on a few from stock to 4.5ghz you could see a 20-30% framerate increase. everyone is convinced that IB will use the 1155 socket and will be compatable with the Z68 chipset but we'll see. i got this and a Z68 to get the best i can get for the time being. it would be nice to throw a IB into this build but im not keeping my hopes up. I7 2600K OC'd 4.5ghz MSI Z68a-GD80 Crucial M4 SSD 2xWD CB 750gb Raid 0 4xSamsung R4 Raid 10 16gb Patriot Viper Xtreme Div II 2xEVGA GTX 580 3gb SLI 3xAsus 27" monitors