Linemi

Thanks for the quick answers Given they are the same price atm, I'll go with the M550

I've always wanted to upgrade my laptop with an SSD and this seems like a good a time as any. So an online shop in my country is doing a sale on their M550 line, so the M550 256GB costs €99,90 and the MX100 256GB is €99,99(in a different, but also reliable webstore) From what I can find the M550 lineup is a more enthousiast line, but when it comes to real benchmarks, the MX100 is equivalent most of the time. Is there any real advantage to go with the M550 at the same price point? edit: I'm not in a rush, should I wait on a sale on the MX100?

My second screen is 15in 1024x768, my college was going to throw it away, so I took it. Better than no 2nd screen I suppose

Many of those sound interesting, as long they don't go with vampires or zombies, I think the last couple of years we've seen plenty zombies

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=keep+digging explains the general term. For LTT, it's specifically about Ubisoft's terrible year

Happy new year LTT <3

Such a cute lil' thing Good luck everyone.

You're mixing up the 2 discussed boards. The dual BIOS issue is about the B85M-D2V and the performance issue is about the B85M-HD3.

Windows Defender(w8.1) & MBAM has kept me safe ever since I started using windows 8.x. On w7 I used AVG free + MBAM.

I believe it is the Heaven Benchmark from unigine. https://unigine.com/products/heaven/ Also, that monitor is stunning!

I suppose you are correct. But doesn't the fact that Gigabyte doesn't supply a unique manufacturer code / "barcode" play a factor here. Making your revision a downgrade, where modern webshops are unable to automatically change this on their productpages, still sounds iffy to me. Maybe I overreacted when I read it and it may not belong here.. My bad.

Because usually a revision means an upgrade, an unadvertised downgrade doesn't sound very costumer friendly, especially if there is no way to know in advance which version you'll receive. As I said above, imagine buying a cheapo motherboard, because the official page tells you it has dual BIOS, and the board that you receive doesn't have that second BIOS chip. Is that alright to you?

Yes, very true, but doesn't this pose a problem when the webshop and the cosumer is unable to know which rev they are receiving? This particular user bought the board especially for the dual BIOS, then it turns out the second BIOS chip was removed, while it was still on the official specification list.

Two revisions of the B85M-HD3. Quite suitable for a game of "spot the differences"! http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5835/spot-the-differences-gigabyte-motherboard-revisisons-present-markedly-different-test-results Apparently Gigabyte regularly revises their products without changing the manufacturer and UPC codes, which results in webshops and price comparison engines, and its costumers, being unaware of the changes that were made to the products. This seems to be a widespread practise in the industry. While usually these revisions are positive for the consumer and might result in more features, compatibility and/or reliability - making it a questionable, but negligible practise - , this time Gigabyte actually removed the second (advertised!) BIOS chip on a revision on one of their motherboard products. Hardware.info decided to test another motherboard; the B85M-HD3 rev 1.0 vs the rev 2.0 and found there are actual measurable and noticeable performance differences. Check the link for some comparison tables. Does LTT think this kind of practise is acceptable? The usual, the more transparency, the better, applies here imo. Changing details on your product(without changing productname), even if it doesn't violate the official spec sheet(so no legal issues), is still questionable. Edit: A very similar problem happened with Kingston early in the year: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

Great looking cards! Thanks Zotac & Linus for this giveaway Good luck everyone