Pros: I purchased the Gigabyte board because of its "ultra durable" design. It seemed to have the best thermal design I could find, which I wanted for long life. I don't plan to overclock, but its nice to know it is all the board I will ever need. The setup was mostly easy, except the RAID setup is buried. The physical quality is very high and it runs fine. It had more connection wires and accessories than needed.

Cons: Picking a motherboard, even just a Gigabyte motherboard, was way too difficult. The number of boards available is crazy. Even the Gigabyte website does very little to help someone sort them out.

Overall Review: I built this computer to be fast and good at photo editing, which is my most difficult application. (I do not do games). I also wanted a quiet and reliable machine, so I chose a conservative thermal design, and I will not overclock. I ended up with a Cooler Master Cosmos case, a OCZ 700W power supply, a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, the Intel E6850 3GHz processor, 4 GB of Crucial Ballistic memory, a Gigabyte 8600 GTS passively cooled video card, 3-500MB Western Digital SATA hard drives, a Samsung DVD burner, Windows Vista Ultimate, and topped it off with a Samsung 305T 30 inch LCD monitor. Its really a wonderful machine. It went together fine and ran first try. Newegg was great. I spent a couple of weeks getting comfortable with the components I purchased, and the Newegg site was where I did most of the research. The selection was great and the navigation superb. The reviews were helpful. Once I had my list, the purchase was easy, fast, and lowest cost. Newegg is all

Pros: Wow, a 1TB for $80. I bought 2. Also got 2 Rosewill docking stations free. The packaging from Newegg was fine, bubble wrap and inside a small box. I installed these drives in my computer, so the docking stations are for the future. I also got a couple of SATA jumpers and the installation went fine. The formatting took a while, I don't think these are real fast, but they are quiet and seem to work just fine.

Cons: I started running the Disk Checkup S.M.A.R.T. program when I installed the drives to look for early issues and to watch long term reliabilty. The "Raw Read Error Rate" started at 253 and dropped to 100 as I started to use the drives. This resulted in a predicted failure the next day. Since the drives are working fine the next day, and the reading is consistently 100, I think 100 is the normal value and the 253 was an initial calibration issue between the drive and the SMART software. I tried to find information about what the normal reading should be, but could not.

Overall Review: Samsung (maybe the other manufactures do) should publish the base normal readings for the SMART values for each drive.

Pros: I went with Vista Ultimate after thinking about XP Pro for a while. It just doesn't make any sense to not use Vista on a new machine. It runs great on this machine and it is very nice visually. I think some of the explorer tools will take some learning before judgement. Right now they just seem different, but they probably have good potential. I think its better than XP, but I wouldn't convert an existing XP machine.

Cons: I am not sure what I got for the Ultimate version.

Overall Review: I built this computer to be fast and good at photo editing, which is my most difficult application. (I do not do games). I also wanted a quiet and reliable machine, so I chose a conservative thermal design, and I will not overclock. I ended up with a Cooler Master Cosmos case, a OCZ 700W power supply, a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, the Intel E6850 3GHz processor, 4 GB of Crucial Ballistic memory, a Gigabyte 8600 GTS passively cooled video card, 3-500MB Western Digital SATA hard drives, a Samsung DVD burner, Windows Vista Ultimate, and topped it off with a Samsung 305T 30 inch LCD monitor. Its really a wonderful machine. It went together fine and ran first try. Newegg was great. I spent a couple of weeks getting comfortable with the components I purchased, and the Newegg site was where I did most of the research. The selection was great and the navigation superb. The reviews were helpful. Once I had my list, the purchase was easy, fast, and lowest cost. Newegg is all

Pros: I picked the Crucial memory as one of the good brands, compatibility with the Gigabyte motherboard, and heat spreaders to fit with the overall conservative thermal design. There is a lot of talk about 4 GB of memory in Windows, but these 4 GB are showing 3.5 in Windows. I wanted as much as I could have for photo editing. It runs fine.

Cons: none

Overall Review: I built this computer to be fast and good at photo editing, which is my most difficult application. (I do not do games). I also wanted a quiet and reliable machine, so I chose a conservative thermal design, and I will not overclock. I ended up with a Cooler Master Cosmos case, a OCZ 700W power supply, a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, the Intel E6850 3GHz processor, 4 GB of Crucial Ballistic memory, a Gigabyte 8600 GTS passively cooled video card, 3-500MB Western Digital SATA hard drives, a Samsung DVD burner, Windows Vista Ultimate, and topped it off with a Samsung 305T 30 inch LCD monitor. Its really a wonderful machine. It went together fine and ran first try. Newegg was great. I spent a couple of weeks getting comfortable with the components I purchased, and the Newegg site was where I did most of the research. The selection was great and the navigation superb. The reviews were helpful. Once I had my list, the purchase was easy, fast, and lowest cost. Newegg is all

Pros: The burner works fine and is quiet. I was going to get the Gigabyte burner, but Newegg had a rare out-of-stock. It runs fine.

Cons: none

Pros: The E6850 chip was the easiest decision. I wanted the speed for photo editing. Intel is hard to beat. The computer is a screamer compared to anything I have used. I am most surprised how much faster the internet is. It just goes bang for each site.

Cons: none

Overall Review: I built this computer to be fast and good at photo editing, which is my most difficult application. (I do not do games). I also wanted a quiet and reliable machine, so I chose a conservative thermal design, and I will not overclock. I ended up with a Cooler Master Cosmos case, a OCZ 700W power supply, a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, the Intel E6850 3GHz processor, 4 GB of Crucial Ballistic memory, a Gigabyte 8600 GTS passively cooled video card, 3-500MB Western Digital SATA hard drives, a Samsung DVD burner, Windows Vista Ultimate, and topped it off with a Samsung 305T 30 inch LCD monitor. Its really a wonderful machine. It went together fine and ran first try. Newegg was great. I spent a couple of weeks getting comfortable with the components I purchased, and the Newegg site was where I did most of the research. The selection was great and the navigation superb. The reviews were helpful. Once I had my list, the purchase was easy, fast, and lowest cost. Newegg is all