Pros: in all my years of building systems i have never come across such a beast! this thing is fast stable and did i mention FAST!!!! loading programs on this beast is amazing! 2mb L2 dual cores, installed stock at 2.7ghz right out the box with no overclocking! I'm in love, makes my socket 939 FX 55 look like a childs toy

Cons: are you kidding me??? umm ok let me think..... took 3 days with ups ground to get here??? cant think of a con!!!

Overall Review: buy it, its pricey but the performance is insane... WHO NEEDS A QUAD CORE WITH THIS THING OUT THERE?????

Pros: its working for now

Cons: well heres a follow up on my second one of these, i gave it 4 stars and thought all was well. after recieving the second one it worked well, thought all was good, now this thing randomly shuts off my system. its at random, load doesnt matter... read other thoughts.

Overall Review: it worked well a few days and shut off the first time, then after about 5 days it randomly did it again. this is my second one, the first one booted up and fried my x1950xtx now im afraid to keep this one in my system with the problems im having, I ran an aspire 500watt cheap 60 dollar psu for forever and had no problems, yet ive gotten 2 of these with issues and i thought i was upgrading! be carefull if you buy this, you might lose more than what your getting.

Pros: I have been watching lucid for a little over a year now waiting for them to get the chips into the mainstream market. It looks Like MSI jumped on board! These chips allow for 90-100% performance based multi GPU link and allows you to mix and match the brands of your video card. Now you can match up that old 9800GTX with your new HD5870 and get a huge performance gain! Time to kiss SLI and Crossfire bye bye!

Cons: new technology. I can forsee driver nightmares for a few months. I would almost wait for a later release and let the technology get perfected.

Overall Review: This should be very interesting. If you are a hard core gamer then you know how horrible the performance gains are with current multi GPU setups. you can never get more than 60% boost per card and its a huge price to performance loss. The Lucid chip is supose to fix this. Only time will tell. Grats to newegg for having it in stock and at a good price. MSI makes great motherboards and now they finaly have an upper hand on Asus thanks to Lucid

Pros: I have the 4x version that this replaced. I got it here at newegg and have been using it for half a year now in my system i built. All my movies run great on my 32 inch Hd Tv using the drive. no skip or stutter. Mine had a slight delay when loading the menu screen but I am sure it was because mine was 4x speed. this 8x should be alot better. I am ordering it to put in my new media center for in the living room.

Cons: The power DVD program that came with mine only had 2 channel audio. it required almost 1gb of updates totaling 4 update downloads in order for any movie made in the last 2 years to play. After all updates are done it worked fine in Vista 64. in Windows 7 64 it gives an error when it starts up but the movies play anyway. it is not a problem with this drive. its an issue with cyberlink power DVD and Asus has no control over that. Be glad we even get playback program with it.

Overall Review: I must say i realy like the 4x version and I look forward to using this 8x. They apear to be 100% identical just different speed. Both come full retail in the same box and with what apears to be the same cruddy version of power DVD. Do yourself a favor and buy the latest full version of Power DVD to unlock HD audio and correct all the windows 7 bugs. Aside from that These are great drives by the best computer parts manufacturer on the face of the planet. Rock solid and heart touching. that is the Asus slogan and they do not lie.

Pros: Big, solid build, great cooling. Works just as good as 1 of those 120mm towers as long as you do not oc to insane limits. Blue lights are bright but not too bright.

Cons: the 1 i bought in 2006 didnt come with the AM2 mounting bracket but it worked in my Apevia Qpack cube with a socket 939 motherboard. By the time i got around to building my AM2 system I just didnt use it. I still have it and keep it on my desk at work (Computer system builder) All the guys at work like to play around with it and hook it up to motherboards just to see it power on. it still works almost 4 years later! so not a con realy.

Overall Review: I am buying another as I am building a new Qpack2 media center PC. parts will be ordered this week and I can't wait to have another in action. the new build will be Asus M4a785TD EVO AMD PhenomII X2 550 black edition 2x 2gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 WD 500gb Black 32mb buffer Sapphire HD5770 Vapor-x Asus Blu-Ray drive Asus Wireless N card PCIEx1 My 32inch 1080P TV This bad boy cooler And world of warcraft ofcourse. I am sure this will get the job done with no problems. I plan to push the cpu to atleas 3.5ghz with this!

Pros: Its a blu ray player for what its worth

Cons: spotty win7 support. only 30 day warranty. That is very shadey. Do not waste your money. Every other company gives atleast a year. To only give 30-60 days is horrible.

Overall Review: bypass this 1 all together. Get the Asus if you need a usb powered blu ray. If you have the option of the external power then go ahead and get the super fast plextor. Both plextor and asus make a quality product and give anywhere from 1-3 years warranty on evey product they sale. Save yourself the time and stress and bypass this altogether.