Pros: ++Trim support over RAID0 for SSDs +2 extra SATA connectors, giving 8 total SATA devices +optical audio (once you go digital, there is no going back!) +more USB3 hookups than previous gen boards +legacy PS2 connector +3 spaces between PCIe16 slots to accomodate xFire or SLi with aftermarget GPU coolers or oversized cards +PCIe1x slot above the GPU +Gold on Black looks much better in person than in these pictures. My case has no window, but it does feel good to look at that thing when it comes out of the box! +eSATA on back panel +Advanced wake features for Win8 'always on' and 'instant on' tech. +Works fine with my old i7 2600 CPU (only thing I do not get is PCIe3 speeds as that is controlled by the newer Ivy Bridge CPUs) +Still able to OC my 2600 to 4.2GHz, though the process was more difficult than with the older z68 boards +Picked up my RAID0 and RAID1 arrays with no problems. Simply enabled the controller and it knew what my old drive configuration was, and all my data was still there.

Cons: -Drivers on disc provided were simply for the wrong motherboard. Thankfully it was easy enough to get the right ones online. I think this was an issue with the store I bought it at, as the box was open and had been looked at by other customers. -Lucid Logic software killed win8, requiring a full re install. No fault of ASRock, and not the first annoyance I have had with Lucid Logic. It is a neat feature, but they need to make their software better!

Overall Review: I got this board specifically to get the TRIM support for SSDs in RAID0. Running many SSDs (especially OCZ drives) without TRIM support will cause your write speeds to slow down over time (and can make read speeds inconsistent). It will also not allow the SSD's internal load leveling technology to work properly, which will cause a premature death of many drives. Sadly, chipsets made before the 7x series (like the z68) did not allow for these TRIM commands to pass through, which causes the drives to slow down over time, so I made the move to this newer board to combat that issue. What a difference a year makes! I moved 'up' from an extreme3 gen3 I purchased a year ago, and loved that board, but this new one is so much better. Better build quality, more intelligent layout, more SATA, more USB3, tons of extra UEFI features that I have only begun to play with. What was meant to be a side-step upgrade for a specific feature has turned into a definite step-up upgrade. I normally only give 4/5 star reviews, but this board has exceeded my expectations. If it was not for the one feature I would still be happy with the old board, but this one does bring quite a few extras to the table.

Pros: bright consistent colors across display LED backlight allows for very neutral greys and 'white whites' No dead/stuck pixels Very even backlighting 1 VGA and 2 HDMI inputs Works just fine at non-native resolutions as found in BIOS, or setting at 720p for gaming on budget GPUs

Cons: Pixels are ridiculously large and bulky (see 'other thoughts') Cheap parts make for lots of noise in the image. The VGA is so bad that I had to hunt down a HDMI cable, and even the HDMI has a fair amount of noise (but passable). Text and static images look rough and boxy with no amount of ClearType or AA that can really smooth the picture out. Certain color patterns, or putting text over some grey backgrounds produce illegible results and strange colors. Color range and contrast is very limited (though greyscale is surprisingly good... not sure how that happens) Color accuracy does not exist and is all over the map, decent OSD controls help reign it in, but it is never going to be 'good' Chroma is just bad.

Overall Review: I bought this as a stop-gap replacement for my wife's 27" monitor that died recently. The old display was a 27" 1920x1200 16:10 display. The main thing it suffered from was a bad backlight setup which caused extremely limited contrast, poor black levels, backlight bleeding that got much worse over time, and the white and greys were always a little on the warm/yellow side. This new display does not suffer from any of those issues. It has a far superior backlight which gives good black level (for a monitor), no bleed, nice even lighting, and very neutral grey scale with white whites. Sadly, the panel and processing end of this display are trash. While the old display had issues with things like dark movies, every other use-case was passable and usable. The big issue is with text. A computer is often used for games and videos which this monitor does an OK job at, but even the most avid gamer spends a ton of time looking at text, and that is where this display falls apart. The pixels are large and poorly defined. Part of this is the nature of such a large display, but our older display had only a slightly higher ppi (83.86 vs 81.59) but the pixels were well defined and things like text and static images were clear and not too blocky. Text over a white background is rough but passable, but when you put text over a grey background, or a color picture, it can quickly become illegible. It is almost like the pixels around the text bleed into it, producing deformations in the shape, or even producing rainbow-like boarders between black text/lines and color images. The other big issue is noise on the processing end. As stated above, the VGA has a fair amount of noise. Still usable, but not something you want to look at all day. Moving to HDMI cleaned up most of it (no more interference patterns crawling up the screen), but there is still that speckled analog looking noise in the screen that I am not accustomed to on a digital input. Lastly, static images look horrible. Lots of stair-stepping between colors. I mean, it is bound to happen on any low ppi display; but again our old display was not that different but cleartype and AA were enough to make it a non-issue, where there is no compensating for it here. At the end of the day I could not recommend this to anyone. This is a junk TV mascaraing as a computer monitor with all of the normal issues that can be expected with such a setup. Thankfully it has an OSD with a lot of controls to vastly improve the stock settings... but even after calibration and running ClearType it is just bad for desktop computer use. I would highly suggest buying a smaller but better quality 1080p display, or else spending a little more money for even a cheap 1440p display at this size which is simply going to have less of these issues. When we do replace this I will use it on my test bench to troubleshoot PCs and watch TV, but we will not use this as a main display any longer than needed.

Pros: 1) Big... but I still wish they were bigger (See other thoughts #4) 2) Fast... I have 2 of these in RAID1 for storage and backups, and 2 SSDs in RAID0 for system drive. Transferring files between them I am getting a consistent sequential read/write speed up near 250+MB/s. When I had a bare drive I was getting 220MB/s, so if you RAID1 them with an actual RAID controller rather than the Intel RAID that I am using you ought to be able to hit reads up near 400MB/s and writes at ~200MB/s. Considering the RAID1 it replaced only ever got 80MB/s on a good day before they started having issues I am blown away! 3) Quiet... And I am a stickler for sound. I have nice 800RPM 140mm case fans and I cannot hear the HDDs above them with the exception of some light read/write head noise which is no big deal. I have bought a ton of drives over the years, but over the last 5 years they have been drives for other people, and as I did not live with them I did not appreciate just how nice and quiet they have gotten the last few years. 4) Cool... Not that it matters that much, but these drives run just barely warm to the touch. Being in RAID I cannot get an actual temp, but these are by far some of the coolest mechanical drives I have ever owned.

Cons: 1) Not a big deal, but you only get 2.7TB of space out of these. Completely understandable when you are converting between Mib to MB, but that is 300GB I wish I had. 2) 1 came DOA. These drives (like most large drives) suffer from a fairly high failure rate. I always borrow PC Check from work to give new drives a good workout to ensure they are working properly. One passed with flying colors, while the other had the click of death. It was half expected which is why I ordered them when I did (well ahead of a major project), but the RMA process from the place I purchased these drives (not Newegg) took nearly 2.5 months! I guess that's what I get for trying to save a buck... 3) Warranty... When I purchased them there was only a 2 year warranty. I understand that there is now a 3 year warranty, but that is still disconcertingly low. I miss the days a few years ago when 5-7 year warranties were the norm. For what I do it is not worth paying the extra $$ for the longer warranty, but at the same time I don't want to go too long out of warranty, so I will have to replace these drives near the 3-4 year mark which is sooner than I would like, but it hopefully will not be a big deal.

Overall Review: Food For Thought: 1) You need to format large drives like this in GPT (google it, easy process). GPT does not support OS installs, and requires a UEFI style BIOS in order to work, so if you are on an older system, or are looking for an over-sized system drive, then do yourself a favor stick with 2TB drives, anything bigger is for storage only. 2) Large drives have a major issue; what on earth do you back them up with? If you have enough files to require this much space, then most likely it is fairly important stuff that would hurt pretty badly to loose. The only real way to do it is to have 2+ large drives, either one as an external backup, or multiple internal drives as a RAID1 or 5 array. Thankfully all major Intel boards, and just about every AMD board has decent software RAID now, so it is not hard to find like it was a few years ago, but enabling RAID can cause issues with your system drive, so plan accordingly! 3) Move to new drives BEFORE you need to. I moved up to these drives from a RAID1 of 1st gen 1TB drives. One of them failed right after the 5 year mark, so I have been running off of one drive for a loooong time now (scary!). I would have upgraded sooner, but.. well... house, cars, babies, life, and other more urgent things kept taking my money every time I scrapped together enough money to pull the trigger on new drives. By the time I finally got around to replacing the drives the remaining functional one was having issues of it's own. So I ended up with a trudgingly slow file transfer of 5-10MB/s. 800GB of data at an average of 7MB/s literally does take DAYS! Plus it was having stability issues when doing long file transfers, so I had to sit and watch it so that I could pick up where it left off before the system would reset. Very annoying process that ate most of my free time for the better part of a week! Thankfully, everything seems to have transferred just fine, and my old (very) dead drives are all ready to be destroyed. Point is, if you can help it, get your information off of your drives at the first sign of trouble and you will save a few headaches! 4) After organizing and removing redundant files (or at least most of them) I got down to 600GB of data (mostly old projects). Then I backed up my system and enabled file history in win8, and that ate another 600GB. Then I did my wife's backup and enabled her file history settings which ate yet another 400GB. So here I bought what I thought was a HUGE amount of space, only to find that it is already more than 1/2 full, and I have not even started ripping my movie collection to it yet! When all is said and done I will probably buy a pair of 2TB drives strictly for system backups (2TB drives are more reliable anyways), which will free up a huge portion of the big drives for documents. Just keep in mind that file backups are nice to have... but they come at a HUGE space expense. Totally worth it, but I had no idea it would eat that much space. Hope that helps

Pros: Still kicking strong! Still getting consistent performance Firmware update got a little more consistent speed out of the drives Work fine in RAID if you have the right chipset (see 'other thoughts')

Cons: I am ruined on HDDs. I cannot stand them anymore. Using my PC at work with a HDD is simply painful. The HDDs in my home system seem really loud now that I have nearly silent fans, and I cannot wait for mainstream 2TB SSDs to become available (and affordable), though it may be a while. No Intel RAID 1 or 5 support for TRIM, and no RAID0 support on z68 or older systems. Not a problem with this drive, but still a major concern, and my next SSDs I will look for drives that are not so dependent on TRIM to work properly. The premium you use to have to pay for faster drives is not nearly as high, making the Agility series much slower but only slightly cheaper than it's bigger faster brothers. That is the only reason for the 1 egg drop.

Overall Review: Some notes on RAID: So over the summer I ended up getting a 2nd Agility 3, and so I put it in RAID0 just to see how quick it would run. And boy-oh-boy is it FAST! HDTune: Read 1GB/s max 575MB/s average 350MB/s min It is fast enough where I can push my big 4.2GHz i7 to 100% load when doing work with ease, which is exactly where the bottleneck should be! That being said, it has not all been sunshine and lollipops with RAID and SSDs. People like me with a slightly older high end system running on a z68 chipset and using the onboard RAID controller need to be aware that TRIM commands are not passed through to the SSDs. TRIM is important to maintaining the drive, and if TRIM is not active then speed will degrade over time by a rather large margin, and wear leveling will not be done properly which will shorten the life of your drive! It is perfectly fine to run an SSD via RAID as a single drive, but when you add it to an array then you will experience problems within a month or two. The solution? Move up to a z77 based motherboard. z77 based RAID controllers will allow TRIM commands to pass through on RAID0 (not RAID1 or 5), which fixes the slowdown that sandforce drives are hit with when trim is not utilized properly. So in short, to add 1 feature, I had to pay $140 extra for a new motherboard. Thankfully I was able to sell my old board to subsidize the cost, and the new mobo does have some neat extra features that I also wanted. But that is a high price to pay for the sake of a single feature, so if you are on a last gen platform it would probably be best to get a single larger drive rather than dealing with RIAD to get your storage needs. Lastly, just for fun, I found some old failed Raptor HDDs, and put my SSDs inside of their enclosures. It makes them look really awesome, and now they just run 2*c over the ambient temp of the room. By far the best 2.5->3.5 converter I have ever seen!

Pros: +wireless +thumb-ball +assignable buttons +large enough to not lose in the couch easily +looks good +feels good +thumb ball more secure in it's socket than previous models, while remaining fairly free-moving +Unifying receiver works! +Software works fine in Win8RTM

Cons: -normal sensitivity issues with thumb balls -wish it had a gesture pad for win8 -Oddly Newegg had a price $10 more than any of the local sores here, never had that problem before, and it was weird going to a store to buy electronics again... been a long time.

Overall Review: These mice are not for everyone. Gamers will hate this mouse, as will photo and video editors due to a lack of exact control. You can have high amounts of control if you want, or you can have it easy to use and easily navigate the screen, but you cannot have both like you can with a normal mouse. Personally I still have a normal mouse for such times that I need it, but my setup is on a sofa, and so the thumb ball is much easier to use as you do not need to worry about the surface it is on, and it is bulky enough to not lose without it being huge. At any rate, for people like me who are set up in an area that is not conducive to the use of a traditional mouse, and who hate trackpads, this is an excellent device. I remember the first 2 I owned claiming that it helps fight corporal tunnel syndrome, but noticed that such advertisements are gone from this box. I used a super old wired version of this back in the '90s on my parent's computer which was perhaps my favorite version. Bought one for my computer ~2003 (wireless similar to this one), but the ball felt stiff while constantly falling out, and it ended up dying prematurely with moderate use. All 3 of these mice have had the same slight sensitivity issue where the ball needs to move a little bit before it picks up any motion, but I must say it seems a lot less noticeable on this one than previous models. Big plus is the unifying receiver. I have purchased several Logitech devices over the years, but have typically only used 1 device, or purchased a keyboard/mouse in the same device, so I have never really gotten to use the 'unifying aspect' before. This time around I simply took the mouse out of the box, pulled the battery tag, and my old receiver picked it up with no problem. An added plus was that the logitech software picked up both the old wired mouse, and the new one, and let me select different motion and button profiles between the two mice! So much better thought out than previous versions of the software that were so bad that I stopped using the device specific drivers a long time ago. win8 automagically installed it this time for me, and I never got around to removing it, and now I may leave it there. Plus I have a spare receiver now, which I could put on the laptop or something I suppose if I ever wanted to use the mouse with that.

Pros: compact design relatively durable, solid construction blue on black never goes out of style CPU airflow shroud prevents warm air re-circulation (important in a small build) Ample space for parts without a lot of wasted space Quiet onboard fan (not silent, but very good... and I am picky) Easy to work on, very few screws. Much better than previous slim cases I have worked with (though I prefer larger boxes myself)

Cons: no USB3, thankfully not an issue for the client I was building for no 80+ power supply (hard to find for a 300W supply I suppose)

Overall Review: Final build: i5 Ivy Bridge with HD2500 graphics 4GB of DDR3 1600 (room for 2 more sticks if needed) wireless card SSD system drive and old laptop data drive in a tray that fit them in a single HDD slot BluRay player/DVD burner All in all, I was able to build a (very) capable machine in a nice small space. When doing normal things this box is nearly silent, when pushing it (intel burn test) all I could hear was the CPU fan kick in a little once it got warm. I will definitely use this again if I do another home/office build