Pros: Not sure where to start, so let's just dive in. This board sports and/or supports USB 3.0, PCI-E 3.0 for next-generation graphics cards, forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs, has four SATA III ports (2 through P67 - use them as boot drives, 2 somewhat slower from Marvell chipset), and 2 SATA II ports. You can also do up to tri-SLI or tri-crossfire in 8x/8x/4x, however if the third card is dual slot it will cover the front panel connectors, so dual cards and a single slot for I guess a Physx card would be do-able. With it's baller gold caps, this board is an overclocking beast with 8+2 phase. My i5 2500K reached [email protected]. It sports a plug for 4-pin molex jack which you will want to use to juice your CPU+GPUs if you do SLI/xfire. Xfast LAN/Xfast USB actually work. Nice PCI layout (w/ dual slot cards in both 8x graphics slots, you still have some PCI and PCI-E 1x lanes usable). UEFI Bios is a pleasure to navigate. Changes made in Extreme Tuner with Windows reflect in the bios.

Cons: Eh, well, ever since I purchased it the price keeps plummeting, ha. But really, the biggest issue and honestly the only one worth stressing is that the USB 3.0 front panel does not operate properly. R/W and copy speeds are not up to par. The rear I/O ports work flawlessly however so it's not a deal breaker, but just an inconvenience. In trying to copy over extra large files from my external using the front panel USB 3.0, the system locks up. Rear USB 3.0 has no issue. I'm sure this will be fixed with a driver eventually. Getting really nitpicky I would say the onboard audio is mediocre. Enough to suffice on a budget, but with all the available expansion slots, a cheap ~$30 soundcard would be something to look into if you want some more audio fidelity.

Overall Review: I mentioned the molex plug above. Definitely recommend figuring out a neat way cable management wise to use that. 3dmark11, 'performance' combined test my scores were low. Plugged in that molex, score went up 7200 to ~7800. My first build in 2005 was with ASRock and their P4V88 on the onset of SATA. I definitely skimped on the motherboard, being an ignorant builder at the time all I wanted was a super fast processor. But little did I know at the time that I wasn't skimping, I was making a very wise choice for value, even though it was purely accidental. That build is still trucking in my mother's office right now. I admit that I gawked at the dorky ASRock name, and my friends and I still make innuendos over their namesake. But simply put, they kick ***. This board being my second of theirs, almost 7 years later, shines in terms of having all your needs and wants for a fair price tag. It's not perfect, but it's as close as you will get to perfect as you can get for this price range

Pros: This card is a great bang for the buck. The clocks were higher than the specifications. 700 core, 1670 shader and 1000 (2000) memory. I was easily able to OC mine to 740, 1700 and 1050 (2100) stable as can be. It handles most modern games at an average of 40 to 45 fps with mostly if not all max settings and 4xAA, including COD4 and COD5.

Cons: Fact: those pros are utterly useless if any of these apply to you: you don't need the free game or your case temps are currently over 35C. If the latter is true, your in for a terrible time trying to keep this cooled down. Out of the box it idles at 74C and exceeds 90C under load if it's in a case with less than average cooling. It will bring your case temps up drastically as a result. Another fact: whoever engineered the fan system on this card is the single dumbest person ever. It blows hot air to the front of the case. Seriously, this person deserves a place a major kick in the face for this degree of stupidity. How did they get a job at nVidia, one must wonder.

Overall Review: I added two extra case fans and changed my CPU fan to one that blows air to the rear improve overall airflow. This cost about $45 to do. I would've changed the GPU's fan, but usually I need a new video card long before it dies so saw that as a waste. I could have spent that $45 on a GPU that was far more powerful and pushes hot air out the rear like it is supposed to, or a similarly priced, better engineered card and put that $45 towards the game that comes free otherwise. I blame myself for not reading enough before buying this garbage. If you let this card raise your temps in your case you will hurt the longevity of other parts that were being heated up by this card. So unless your system sits in a freezer by default, skip this card and look elsewhere. Now that they're only offering *one* COD game with it for free, it's completely pointless to even be looking at this piece of trash.

Pros: It runs cool, quiet, and fast. The three 8-pin power connectors provide lots of juice directly from the PSU. Out of the box, it reaches a max core boost clock of 2085 with no overclocking. Setting the fans manually to ~75% keeps it very cool (60c or below) and the fans are barely audible. It's worth noting that for a card this large, it doesn't sag as much as you may expect. The RGB accents are nice once you get them to your liking. There is plenty of headroom to save power draw and heat with undervolting. My card runs at 1950MHz undervolted to 0.90v, dropping power draw from ~360 watts at stock to ~285 watts. This greatly dropped system temps with minimal impact on performance.

Cons: This card is beefy. You really need to plan around it's 12.5" length and almost 4 slot width. The added LED screen is interesting but is just an unnecessary part that raises the cost of production and could have been completely left out. Gigabyte software is trash. If you are lucky enough to install it, start it, and have it recognize your card be 100% sure to apply the EXACT settings you think you want for a lifetime. No exaggeration. Once you close the software, there is no guarantee when you reopen it that it will ever work again. No matter how many reboots, driver rollbacks, software reinstalls... it may never predictably load and detect anything ever again. Shout out to Newegg for selling new GPUs only as combos with motherboards, memory, power supplies, etc. Your sales ethics are also a major con. This makes it such a hassle to buy and have to deal with the headache of returning the other part of the combo. There has to be a better way to do this.

Overall Review: At the end of the day, it's an RTX 3080. Beggars can't be choosers, but even so, this is not a bad card at all. It's just that it's a tad bulky. But that bulk is what helps achieve better thermals with lower fan noise. Unfortunately, the bulk also makes space for the pointless LCD screen that adds to the cost... an LCD screen that can only be controlled by the terrible software that Gigabyte can't write properly.

Pros: -Ran stable on XMP with no issue. -Able to set CL to 14 and remained stable at stock 1.35v -Nice RBG colors that are sleek and stylish without being gaudy

Cons: -Cannot link in to Motherboard RGB control

Overall Review: Intel Core i7 8700k Asus Maximus X Hero (Wi-Fi AC) EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2 80+ GOLD

Pros: Based on what I was seeing in the public forum, I felt like the only way to run this CPU was to delid it and put a water loop on it. I was quite relieved that it runs under 70C on air with 4.7 on all cores at 1.16v. Coming from a 2500K running at 4.7 on a custom water loop, this is a welcome surprise in terms of performance per watt.

Cons: The box was quite pathetically small and it didn't come with a stock air cooler to laugh at and toss to the side. Also, the chip runs too cool to adequately reheat my Taco Bell Chalupas.

Pros: Sturdy, well-designed cooler by EK. I really appreciate the fact that I can see how much air still needs to be bled by looking up thru the clear portion of the etched out EVGA logo on the block to help maximize cooling effectiveness. The block illuminates with a white LED that can be adjusted with EVGA LED controller to pulse at a custom pace, adjust brightness or completely disable it. With ambient temps around 25C, the card idles around 27C and hits 39C under load. Upgraded from a GTX 780 Hydro Copper and I see from 35-50% more performance. For most games it's not showing any bottleneck from a 2500K OC'd to 4.7GHz - a relief as well as a testament to the CPU. Without that OC though, this processor would definitely hold this card back a little bit. Something to keep in mind if you still have a quad core from the last few years. No overclocking for now, as I see no real reason for it given the CPU I have would probably not entail much benefit from doing so. The boost kicks up to 1380MHz core, above the advertised 1228MHz at the default 1.12v. The drivers are excellent as expected from team green.

Cons: In the past, Hydro Copper cards have come with sets of barbs. This card does not come with any, just a forewarning. Not really a con, but if you expect and rely on them in the package that would be a minor problem potentially.

Overall Review: Newegg shipping/processing was fast. However, the card was packed at the very bottom of the box with all of the packing air bags on top all on one side, leaving the entire surface area of the card on the bottom right against the cardboard. Luckily no issues were yielded as a result, but this is just sloppy packing Newegg! Never had this issue before with you guys, but this is something that should NEVER happen when shipping sensitive items, especially from a vendor as solid as this.