Pros: Easy install, and a good set of installation hardware. Fresh Windows 7 x64 with this drive went very smoothly. Burned a 4gb dvd in no time compared to my last dvd-writer. Good reviews. Medium-loudness when rev'd up, but not bad really.

Cons: Way too many logo's on the tray front. The bundled software is a little obnoxious in that it wants to install a bunch of programs that includes a tooling that runs in your tasktray - there's no excuse for that kind of stuff.

Overall Review: I don't particularly need the bluray support right now, but who knows. If you don't need the writer-functions, you can get a dedicated bluray reader for a lot cheaper, I just didn't want 2 different CD drives in my computer. Rating is for the hardware... the software is meh.

Pros: Was "free" (automatically bundled with a CPU I purchased).

Cons: Serves no useful purpose. Technically it's a keytag, but I wouldn't hang any important keys on this. I would be surprised if anyone actually purchased this without it automatically being bundled in for free -- definitely not worth the price otherwise. In any event, I would much rather had the option to skip the swag and get a larger instant-rebate on the CPU.

Overall Review: "Is that an Intel Bunny People in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

Pros: Really, a card with top-notch performance. You're paying for throughput, and you get it. I've bought a lot of eVGA cards over the years, and have been fairly pleased with them as a brand.

Cons: Item arrived and worked great initially. Within a couple of weeks, unit developed sporadic graphical artifacts. I down-clocked the GPU RAM a bit, and it improved briefly, but soon got worse. I ended up RMA'ing the unit through eVGA and have had no problems with the replacement. -1 egg because of the trouble, waiting, and shipping cost. Seems to require a special version of the nVidia driver package that is specific for the 580 (it wouldn't recognize the nvidia 240 I used temporarily while I was exchanging the 580). Card does run fairly hot... seems to peak at 85C. The exhaust is fairly toasty! House is cold in winter, but hopefully I won't have issues when summer approaches. The fan seems to have extra capacity

Overall Review: Make sure you register this card with eVGA immediately. Every time *I* buy a high end graphics card, it ends up dying. Granted, I've only ever bought a top-end card twice, but both times I've had to RMA it. Maybe it's my bad luck, but it's really irritating. I'll probably never buy a top-of-the-line new release video card ever again.

Pros: Got this to replace an older PCI-E model nvidia 8600. With no other system upgrades, this improved 3d performance. Better, there's no power molex needed for additional power. Card was stable, and installed as easily as an addon card possibly could. There was an excellent rebate when I purchased, final price is below $50 and an absolute no-brainer.

Cons: It's taking quite a while for the rebate to be processed. I might have preferred ditching the DSUB output and having 2 DVI ports (if for whatever reason you need a dsub there's all kinds of adapters). The HDMI is fine, of course. 3-video outputs would have been super sweet.

Overall Review: I purchased an nvidia 580 about the same time. It cost 10X more, and frankly, the improvement is hardly noticeable on many games like WoW. Unless you buy the latest & greatest games on a regular basis, I virtually guarantee this card will meet your needs for a while to come.

Pros: Works fine. Pretty cheap.

Cons: What to do with the smaller SO-DIMM it's replacing? Hrmm....

Overall Review: Not much need to get super fancy with RAM for a laptop. Get the cheapest, highest capacity stuff you can get for your machine that has the same spec's as whatever you already have in there. Laptops generally have enough inefficiencies that higher-end RAM isn't going to do anything for you except empty your wallet faster.

Pros: High capacity, reasonable fast, pretty quiet, and most importantly, wasn't DOA.

Cons: Not super-duper high speed... I'm spoiled with the SSD in my laptp, though. This is the slowest component in my Windows Performance Index - 5.9 of 7.9.

Overall Review: I have bought exclusively Seagate drives for the last several years and mostly been pleased. A year or 2 ago, I had an older model 1TB go bad within a month or so purchase, but Seagate took care of it. Despite all the DOA talk in these reviews I decided I would cut them the benefit of the doubt, and so far all is well.