Pros: My processor overclocked to 3.2GHz by doing absolutely nothing besides turning up BCLK to 160MHz. Never tried the stock heatsink, but with a Noctua NU-12P SE1366 My cores run at 32C idle and 55C in Prime95 at 2.67GHz. Temps when OC'd to 3.2GHz are exactly the same! By turning Vcore up to 1.30V and BLCK up to 180MHz, 3.6GHz is rock solid, but temps go up to 36C idle and 65C in Prime95. This is all with the Turbo still enabled, so if you are running a heavy single-threaded app with the BCLK at 180MHz this part self-OC's to 3.8Ghz and runs at about 41C. It would probably run faster, but I don't feel comfortable running a core beyond 70C and don't want to mess with water cooling or the fans necessary to air-cool. At 1.30V Vcore and 180MHz BLCK, my machine gets Passmark scores of 2972 for the total system and 8262 for the CPU!

Cons: Going beyond 3.2GHz, the system blue-screens during prime95 if unless you increase Vcore. Beyond 3.6GHz, because of the Vcores required, power consumption goes up really fast and the power-performance ratio really isn't worth it for me. Price of my tower came to $1500 without a monitor.

Overall Review: This was an upgraded on my home PC from an Athlon XP Barton 2800+ (overclocked 2500+) so my exuberance might be out of perspective for some of you. However, my work PC's and laptop are all Dell Core 2 Duo's and are still really sluggish compared to this beast. System components: Antec 900, GA-EX58-UD5, 6GB GSkill F3-12800CL9T-6GBNQ 1600DDR3, EVGA GTX 260+, PC Power S75QB 750W power supply, Vista 64 Ultimate, Samsung SH-S223Q DVD, 2xSamsung F1 HD103UJ 1TB in RAID 1. All from Newegg, except my heatsink--Newegg didn't have any real LGA1366 heatsinks :(

Pros: Excellent recent reliability history of the company. Very quiet.

Cons: High cost. Quite slow compared to Seagate's ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM drive. Very warm to the touch compared to the Seagate: No benchmarks out there (currently)

Overall Review: I think there is a reason that HGST didn't send these drives out for benchmark reviews. I bought this drive to use a parity drive for an unRAID server. Here are the preclear numbers vs the Seagate: Pre Read: 111MB/s vs 130MB/s Zeroing: 125MB/s vs 159MB/s Post Read: 59MB/s vs 88MB/s The Post Read is done with a lot of interspersed random block reads and is a very good indicator of comparative seek speed. 33% slower is not very good. I have 3yr-old drives in the array that perform better than this "new" HGST model.

Pros: Essentially silent at idle Very, very quiet at load Stable Faster than a R9 270X Very low idle power (entire i7-4770K 4.4GHz PC idles at 52W total input).

Cons: This card's fan design doesn't vent much air out the back of the case. You must have a well ventilated case to use this card. It is flimsy. If you plan to move your case around a lot (e.g. take it to LAN parties) then you'll surely want to reinforce it. The end sags about 1/2" Rebate process is tricky. Definitely designed to make you screw up so that they can keep their $30.

Overall Review: I bought this card because I wanted a quiet, if not silent, PC capable of running the newest games at 1080p. This card did not disappoint.

Pros: Can be made to be very, very quiet if fine tuned Pump has no lame LED's on it Made by the same company who makes pretty much all the all-in-one water coolers Pump and Fans hold their settings. Can uninstall control software after getting things set they way you want them. If properly tuned, I believe that this unit has the quietest fan and pumps out of all the all-in-one coolers.

Cons: Both pump and fans are quite noisy if you leave everything on default settings.

Overall Review: Build Components I7-4770K Thermaltake Extreme 3.0 Water Cooler Master N200 Mini-Tower Case PowerColor HD 7950 Boost (with large quiet dual-fans) The waterblock must be mounted with the hoses coming out the bottom. I tried mounting with them at the top and it made a lot of racket. As far as I can tell, the radiator can be mounted any way you want. The waterblock and the 2 radiator fans all run off a single 3-pin motherboard fan header. In order to get silent operation, I used the following settings: Motheboard CPU fan PWM (running the pump) 50C 60% 60C 65% 70C 70% 75C 80% 80C 90% (above 80C the pump will run 100%) Radiator Fans (determined by water temps and controlled by Thermaltake software): 30C 25% 34C 30% 38C 50% 43C 75% (never happens in my build) 45C 100% (never happens in my build) Keep in mind that the radiator fans run off of the PWM’d CPU fan. So 25% on the radiator fans is really only about 16% because it is being fed by a 65% PWM running the pump and so forth. 4.4GHz overclock (all cores at 4.4GHz, stock voltage) CPU temps are 24-28C idle (speed-steps down to 800MHz), 50-58C under typical gaming load, and 80-82C under heavy burn test (Aida64, Prime95, etc.). With the fans mounting on the inside and pulling cool outside air through the radiator at the front of the case, this setup is essentially silent from 18 inches away under normal operation and still very quiet under heavy load. Under all but the heaviest of loads, this system is much quieter than both the Noctual NH-D14 and Phanteks PH-TC14PE systems that I have build in the past.

Pros: Smallest tower-type case that is made to fit a 120x240mm water radiator internally. Will fit a pair of even the longest video cards Excellent airflow Could easily fit 2 GTX Titans if you wanted Uses full-size ATX power supply Excellent value

Cons: Longer Blu-ray burners like the Pioneer BDR-208 will hit the top right screw on an ATX motherboard. If they would have made the case only 0.25" longer I wouldn't have had to leave this screw out and tape the side of the drive so it wouldn't short components it touched on the motherboard. Included 120mm fans (2 total) are a bit "rattley" at 12V White power button LED is way too bright, had to turn it off.

Overall Review: Build Components I7-4770K Asrock Extreme4 PowerColor HD7950 Boost Pioneer BDR-208 Thermaltake Extreme 3.0 Water Rosewill Capstone-450 2x4GB GSKILL DDR3 Kingston 256MB SSD No 3.5” drives (bay removal was very easy) My goal was a silent, moderately overclocked bedroom gaming computer. I had to PWM the two included 120mm Cooler Master fans down to 7V to keep them silent. In my opinion, if the ear can hear them in a normal home from more than 12 inches away, then they aren’t silent. Front fan was relocated to the side of the case to aid in blowing air onto the MB. The mounting location isn’t very well suited to this though. It mostly blows on the video card. The radiator was mounted with the fans on the inside, in a pull configuration. It took some fine tuning of especially the Termaltake cooling pump/fans to get them to spin up at the proper temps, but I now have a stable, and silent, 24/7 at 4.4GHz overclock at stock voltages (speed-step still enabled). Under typical 3D gaming (about 110-160 watts depending on the game) the system is silent. So far, only the burn-in tools (Aida64, Prime95, etc.) load down the system enough to cause the fans to kick on. Maximum temps inside case never exceed 45C, even at the heaviest CPU+GPU loads (about 305W total) after hours and hours of running.

Pros: Very stable and fast. I run a 24/7 overclock at 4.65GHz at stock voltages. About 2.5X faster at 4.65GHz than my I7-920 was at 3.6GHz. X79 platform with a lot of life left in it. Intel will likely release an compatible 8-core Ivy-bridge variant of a similar clock speed in the next 8-12 months.

Cons: Windows rates it 7.8 even when overclocked to 4.65GHz. According to Microsoft it is the slowest item in my system. Everything else scores a 7.9.

Overall Review: My processor actually easily hit 5GHz for running benchmarks. However, I use my PC for income and it must be totally stable and I don't like exceeding 80C or 1.35V. I had to lower the clock all they way down to 4.65GHz before It finally survived my 48-hour torture test.