Incredible speed that will make you cry on first boot, yes its that good.
351822
Incredibly fast SSD that's so good you might roll a tear when your system boots for the first time.. and several times after. I am using this to run my OS for a video editing and light gaming system I built recently and am so happy I made the jump into SSD world. If you are thinking about joining the PC master race, then please consider this drive and maybe throw in an Asus PCIE M.2 card for quick setup. Also I would highly encourage anyone wanting to migrate to this drive to download the Samsung migration software, it was able to find and migrate my boot drive to the SSD and made the whole process easy.
3405977
Ordered this drive on monday, received it wednesday, tore the box open and threw it in my PC. At first I had tried to do the install and the PC didn't recognize the drive. I threw my hands up in the air "CURZE YOU OCZ" I yelled. I knew the reputation of the Sandforce drives and knew it well and I feared I had bought a drive which was simply not going to work.

However after checking my BIOS options, I realised i had made a mistake in the configuration, I fixed it and less than an hour later, I was fully updated on Windows 7 Ultimate and logging into my steam account.

Less than one hour from starting install to getting on Steam. I was amazed.

Coming from an old IDE HDD to this blew my mind in a way I thought not possible. I was wondering if the hype about SSD's was just stirred up to sell more high cost, low storage drives and if I should just wait till they hit 1 buck per gig. I have to admit that compared to traditional HDDs, any SSD will gobble up cash in a way not seen for almost a decade now in traditional drives. The promise, however, of picking this drive up for 200 bucks after rebate piqued my interest. I bit and i'm nothing but happy I did. I was amazed how much of a difference changing one part out of a machine I considered "Aging" (to a hardcore gamer or enthusiast) made. (For reference i'm running a e8400 Core 2 duo @ 3.0GHz, Sapphire 4870 1G, and 4Gb of Patriot RAM.)

So far so good, i've been really happy with my purchase so far. Now, lets hope it stays that way.

As they may have said on an OCZ version of "Press Your Luck" "Big performance, No BSODs. . ."
1543922
The speed on this is godsend, very very happy. Do not be cheap, get this it's worth every penny
2041823
I pre-ordered the Xbox One Day One Edition back in July and received it on day one, just as promised. I had to wait to open it as it was technically my Christmas gift, so during that time I read numerous articles and comments/reviews on amazon stating that people were receiving faulty units. This lead to much anxiety for me as I was uncertain if I would be one of the unlucky people. But to my surprise, I escaped that fate.

Now onto the review.

HARDWARE:

Firstly, let me just say, that when you get this thing up and running it is crazy fast. The initial boot up takes about 3-5 minutes, and then you have to download the mandatory day one update. That only took about 10 minutes. But after that, booting up only takes a few seconds. It is also extremely quiet. When it's on it is silent. Even when it's installing or playing a disc. The most you will hear is the faint (and I mean faint) whirring of the fan. The only negative I found was that installing a game takes FOREVER.  Forza 5 took more than an hour to install, but I heard that the game is more than 36GB and I guess the fact that you can play partially installed games negates the wait time.

CONTROLLER:

The new controller is the best control I have ever used, period. It is a little smaller, but still has a bit of weight to it, which I love. The thumb sticks are a little smaller and may take some getting used to, but they feel comfortable and do as advertised, which is to ensure your fingers don't slip off. The left and right bumpers are a little bit stiffer, but it doesnt ruin the control for me. The triggers however are BONKERS. I didn't think vibration in the triggers would make much difference, but when you're taking a corner too fast and your tires lose grip, you really feel it thanks to the impulse triggers. Switching back to the 360 control to play GTA 5 online and the differences became even more apparent.

SOFTWARE (OS):

The operating system of the Xbox One is a big step up from the 360. It's VERY windows tile heavy, which I don't mind. Switching between apps, games and TV is almost instant and you pick up right where you left off. However, make sure to save any game you're playing before you switch to other apps. I've noticed that when switching from Forza 5 to another app, the game would still be running when going back, but opening more than one other app will close the game. I also found it kind of difficult navigating and trying to find things at first, so you may want to get used to pinning things to the home screen. Also, for some reason when downloading apps or games/demos, they would randomly stop with no reason given, and I would need to manually go and start it up again. I also don't understand why I had to download an app to play Blu Ray movies(???) All in all, its still a great experience. A couple updates and it can be perfect.

KINECT:

Not much to say about the Kinect. The area at which it can detect people is vastly improved over the last model, and it is super cool to be able to walk in front of it and it remembers your face and signs you (and whoever else has an account) in. It can pick up my voice pretty well, even when in a moderately noisy room. The only annoying thing is the much advertised Xbox On command. It only works about half of the time. Even in a pin-drop quiet room, it doesnt pick up my voice. And for some strange reason, it hears me better when I whisper it versus me saying it in a normal speaking volume/tone.

This is a great console and I cannot wait to see what this thing can do when more content becomes available. Bring on Titanfall, ES: Online and The Witcher 3!
1482327
I love it! Blazing fast. It arrived in perfect condition and works as expected. Easy install. I won't post any benchmarks as there are plenty out on the internet you can find. I use it as a boot drive and windows 10 pops open in less than 10 seconds...I'm amazed. I installed a few games on it, Witcher 3, Pillars of Eternity, and Bioshock Remastered and the load screens are no more than 5 seconds and sometimes even just 1 or 2 seconds...never going back to mechanical drives again. Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB is my new best friend :) I highly recommend it to anyone willing to pay a little extra for that premium quality speed and durability. You won't regret it.
1577861
The thing is absolutely amazing. It took SECONDS to setup and my Wi-Fi speed jumped up 1.5-2 times (speedtest.net: 350 mbps DL / 500 mbps UP) in comparison to my old router  Asus N66U. Also, latency decreased and surfing feels quite a bit faster than before. I got my AE for just $110 (refurbished) and it is worth every cent.
2585302
Drive is very good and fast.  Loads windows 10 up in about 20 seconds on a cold start up with a budget HP 15 laptop.  I will say this though for the inexperienced, if you have a low memory budget machine (like this one which only maxes out at 8 gigs), then make sure you don't enable momentum cache in Crucials Storage Executive software.  It could cause audio jitters during playback.  Another thing is that the Acronis software caused a lot of crashes for some strange reason.  It worked flawlessly throughout the cloning procedure, but after a couple of months it started crashing a lot.  So just make sure you save the code and uninstall it if you start getting that problem.
1622246
Extremely fast boot, great Web surfing machine!
4275026
Superspeed at startup, would recommend it to everyone
1572100
Pros:

- fast Fast FAST!  For the price, its really hard to beat the specs of this machine.  The i7's and the factory 8 gigs of ram make this machine a screamer.
- Build quality is excellent.  I cant find any build defects whatsoever.
- Keyboard is quite nice to use and is good quality.  Keys aren't exaclty what i would consider high quality, but for a laptop I have no complaints
- Large multi-touch trackpad.  Having multi-touch in Windows 8 makes for a MUCH better experience than a standard trackpad.
- GTX670MX is an excellent GFX card.  It should run most modern games for you, although some will be need to be tuned down a bit. I played the demo of Mass Effect 3 and it looked brilliant.  Also, being Kepler based it stay much cooler and saves on energy than some of its counterparts.
- Excellent ventilation.  I play SWTOR for hours on end (not the most demanding game) and it barely warms up.  Laptop stays cool to the touch and very little heat coming from the exhaust.
- Dual Hard Drive SATAIII bays.  It comes standard with a 1TB 5400rpm Hard drive, but its nice to have the spare slot for additional storage/SSD boot drive.

Cons:

- Size.  This isn't really a con to me but I thought I would list it for potential buyers.  This is no small laptop.  I use this as more of a desktop replacement so it works well for me.  If you plan on traveling a lot I would probably something smaller and lighter.
- Standard 1TB 5400rpm Hard Drive.  To me this is an odd choice by ASUS.  A very high performing machine hindered by a slow drive.  Do yourself a favor and replace it with an SSD and move this drive to the 2nd bay for storage.
 - No blu-ray drive.  This isn't really a con for me but I thought I would list it.  You really wouldn't want to be toting this thing around watching movies anyway
- No OS discs included.  Why is this becoming so rare?  If you want to re-install Windows 8 to a different drive you'll have to order an OS disc from ASUS or find someone with a Windows 8 disc (Key is stored on the motherboard so it will auto detect for you)

Wrap Up:

All in all this is an excellent laptop.  It performs very well out of the box.  If you want to make this thing even better for a little extra cash, replace the standard 1TB 5400rpm with a SSD and move the 1tb to the other bay.  Re-install windows to the SSD and this machine boots in less than 8 seconds.  Also to future proof a bit (or for bragging rights), install 2 x 4gb ram sticks in the 2 open slots on the bottom of the computer to 16 gigs total.  As of today, you can get a 64Gb SSD for about 80 bucks and 2x4GB Ram for about 60.

Feel free to comment with questions!
2996240
Cannot believe the boot time and download speeds! Just amazing. Cannot believe the price as well.

I play tournament gaming as well as level design with CryEngine 3. If I am going For The Win (FTW) I Must have the fastest Speed possible. This week I am slapping two of these 128's in my Asus G53. I have been running an 80gb Intel SSD, but the space limitations are horrendous. Now I can raid and have cumulative 256gb space with 2x the speed of my Gen 1 Intel SSD.
3435430
There are already a bunch of technical reviews here so I'll just sum it up and reinforce those.  This drive is insanely fast.  The overall system performance increase is mind bending.  Everything, and I mean everything is significantly faster.  I recently built a Core i7 6700K system initially with a SATA III SSD I had laying around.  It was fast but I wasn't blown away.  Then I installed this monster.  Totally in awe of what this can do.  Windows loads almost instantly, games are ready in a heartbeat, even web pages load a LOT faster.  I can't recommend this drive enough for absolutely everyone.  No matter what you use your PC for, you will notice and benefit from the performance increase.
1277797
This is a seriously fast hard drive.  Color me impressed.  Western Digital is really moving up in my book.

OK, so on it's face, this seems like your basic 1TB external hard drive.  It has its own power supply, which many will find to be cumbersome, but for this level of performance I think it's worth it.  However, this is not your basic 1TB external.  For one, it has a superfast USB 3.0 interface, and it comes with its own USB 3.0 expansion card if your motherboard doesn't already have one (and at the time of this writing, there are less than a handful of new motherboards that do).  The expansion card requires a free PCI-E slot.

Setup:
I tested this on Windows 7 Ultimate x64.  Windows did not automatically find drivers for the USB 3.0 expansion card, but the WD package includes a driver disc.  The drivers aren't just sitting on the disc, you have to run an installer on the disc.  The installation requires no restart, which is great, because that's always a little scary when installing strange new hardware.  After the card is installed, you can just plug the drive in and go.  What's nice is that Windows views the drive as an actual hard drive and not just removable media -- a minor point.

Performance:
Using TeraCopy (which is fantastic file copy alternative), I was able to get between 94 and 101 MB / sec write speeds!  That's super fast.  By comparison, my WD Caviar Black RE3 1TB drive only does around 63 MB/sec write speeds, and I thought that was nice!  I haven't tested read speeds, but I expect them to be pretty high.  USB 3.0 has a 4.8 GB/sec limit so the bottleneck here is certainly not the bus.

Sound:
The drive is dead silent, and the white LED on the front is not blinding in any way.  It resembles the light on a Mac Mini.

Convenience:
Since USB 3.0 is new, you're not likely to find it around too much just yet.  But you can still plug this guy into regular old USB 2.0.  You'll get around 25 MB/sec write speeds with that.  But just the fact that you can do it is convenient.  Having to carry around the power supply, however, is not.  And you have to be careful with your USB 3.0 cable because there's only one.

Price:
I think the price is pretty good for this level of performance and also considering they give you a USB 3.0 expansion card.  You'd pay about the same for an enterprise-level, internal WD RE3 drive of this size.

Negatives:
I wish there was eSATA because then I wouldn't need a free PCI-E slot or have to open up my computer to install it.  But the deed is done, and now I have an extra USB 3.0 port for some other device.  Still, eSATA would be nice.  Maybe there are USB3 to eSATA adapters...
Only a 2 year warranty?!  That's rough for a 1TB drive.  WD internal drives run between 3 and 5 year warranties.  But I suppose they're not willing to put that kind of warranty on an external drive that gets moved around a lot.  Still, a longer warranty would instill more confidence that my data is safer.  Backing up 1TB worth of data is not easy or cheap.

Conclusion:
I would absolutely recommend this thing.  I was a little skeptical at first, but the numbers don't lie.  This thing is fast.
1125497
This board is simply incredible. There are a vast amount of options in the BIOS, allowing you to tweak your whole user experience. If you are an over-clocker this board will not disappoint. The bios offers good control for the CPU and RAM, as well as many options for changing voltages. The board has a very good windows based over clocking feature, ET6, which if used with appropriate RAM has a very handy auto OC feature for novice users. The RAM I use in mine is Patriot Viper DDR3 1333, and it works well with the auto OC option.

The board also has great power saving functions, which if you are a "green" user might be a good selling point.

The overall board layout is wonderful, the SATA ports do not conflict with long graphics cards, and it comes with an e-SATA bracket.

The board includes a wide variety of accessories, including a very nice, fully labeled back I/O panel.

The Intel RAID works great, and has fast speeds in RAID0.

SOME SPECS:

Brand GIGABYTE

Model GA-EP45T-UD3P

CPU Socket Type LGA 775

CPU Type Core 2 Quad / Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo

FSB 1600/1333MHz

Chipsets North Bridge Intel P45

South Bridge Intel ICH10R

Memory Number of Memory Slots 4240pin

Memory Standard DDR3 2200(O.C)/1333

Maximum Memory Supported 8GB

Channel Supported Dual Channel

Expansion Slots PCI Express 2.0 x16

  1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16
  1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8

PCI Express x1 3

PCI Slots 2

Storage Devices

PATA 1 x ATA100 2 Dev. Max

SATA 3Gb/s 8

SATA RAID 0/1/5/10

Onboard Video

Onboard Video Chipset None

Onboard Audio

Audio Chipset Realtek ALC889A

Audio Channels 8 Channels

Onboard LAN

LAN Chipset Realtek 8111C

Second LAN Chipset Realtek 8111C

Max LAN Speed Dual 10/100/1000Mbps

Rear Panel Ports

PS/2 2

USB 1.1/2.0 8 x USB 2.0

IEEE 1394 2 x IEEE 1394a

S/PDIF Out 1 x Optical, 1 x Coaxial

Audio Ports 6 Ports

Internal I/O Connectors

Onboard USB 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers

Onboard 1394 1 x 1394a

Form Factor ATX

Dimensions 12.0" x 9.6"

Power Pin 24 Pin
211913
I bought this for my system setup and boot times are crazy! After setting up my OS on this drive I created a RAID 0 (backed up of course) out of three SATA drives and get great speed from that setup (actually faster than the SSD drive). I can only imagine how sick fast my system would be if I took two or more of these drives and set those up as a RAID 0.

Yeah, so before I go too far off course, these drives are fast. The only downside I see is that you do get a bit annoyed when using a system that is not running off a fast SSD drive. I am considering getting another one of these drives for my laptop even though I would be giving up about 500GB of disk space (the speed would be worth it).
4383651
Should have got one long time ago, it`s great, my PC boots really fast
2934547
It's fast on 3.0, as it should be. The next bottleneck is the hard drive speed. If you're pulling from SSD then it's no problem for large files.
Was recognized by Windows XP off USB 1.0 that hasn't been hooked up to the internet for a long time. Surprised me.