Pros: A good HDD goes unnoticed. I'm not terribly interested in the elaborate benchmarking of the drive. I upgraded from a 7200 RPM drive expecting the PC to be more responsive and it did just that. The most noticeable performance boost was playing late-game turns in Civilization 5 with a full map.

Cons: Like I said, the drive goes unnoticed so I guess there aren't any cons.

Pros: The screen is huge! It provides all the benefits of having 2 monitors without the annoying bezel gap between them. The colors are very rich.

Cons: NO REMOTE! This sounds trivial, but the menus are difficult to navigate and the built-in speakers mean a remote is more than a luxury. If the monitor stops receiving a signal from the selected input (eg the computer turns off), the monitor is completely unresponsive for at least 10 sec to the click of the button. A common sequence is to turn off one computer and switch inputs to a second computer. Doing so takes 20 sec! The menus are annoying at best, but more commonly they are down right frustrating. On first click of the menu button, there are a short list of options (reader mode, dual link, menu, and power). The lack of input being immediately accessed is frustrating. The construction is shoddy. The bottom plate is pealing away at the corners. It isn't the end of the world, but for the price they could at least put the bezel together well.

Overall Review: I would not recommend this monitor to a friend, but I would highly recommend a monitor this size.

Pros: Other than the Z170 chipset, there isn't anything noteworthy

Cons: PCB lines were run right next to the mounting holes for the CPU cooler. Unless you're careful, it's easy to nick one and kill the board. The memory modules are tad too close to the CPU. I used the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO Cooling Fan and it was very tight. The "fast boot" option in the BIOS is a joke. With it enabled, half the time the only drive i have would not be recognized. It is the inconsistency of the problem that is annoying and suggests the problem lies in Gigabyte's BIOS. Even when the drive was recognized, the PC would boot to a black cursor for 10 sec before booting to the OS. Even when it worked it still wasn't even "fast."

Overall Review: Overall this board does the job, but there were too many annoyances to say it does the job well. Would not recommend.