Spyagent1000

Swapping controllers and boards on storage drives is a very dangerous thing, especially when it comes to SSDs. You could easily lose all data and corrupt the firmware of the SSD itself rendering it completely unusable. Contacting the manufacturer is the best option.
 
Captain_WD. 

Not really. There is a huge variety of EKWB fullcover blocks available for board partner PCB designs. Reference is used i.e. for Titan, Titan X or early adopters, that want the latest and greatest at release right away. With a reference card a fullcover block is almost certain guaranteed for modern GPUs if you want to go for custom water cooling, whilst there are board partner designs out there that will never have a fullcover block available, due to a lack of demand or popularity.
And a nVidia reference cooler from Kepler on with thermal throttling... ehm no, unless you OC the shit with a modded BIOS.
But reference coolers are not as capable as a beefy board partner cooling design and like stated above many cards come with OCing potential, due better VRM and cherry picked chips. Also there are certain scenarios where a reference design makes more sense than a board partner. Especially in tight spaces like multi GPU scenarios or mITX cases.

Get the aftermarket card ( MSI, EVGA, etc. ) as it has an open cooler, which gives you better cooling and in turn, less noise. The reference card from Nvidia has a closed cooler, making your gpu hotter and in turn, producing more noise. The advantage to the closed cooler is that it traps heat in the gpu and exhausts it out the back, keeping the rest of your pc cool. The open cooler is the opposite, keeping the gpu cooler but the rest of your pc hotter, so its important to have an exhaust fan to get the heat from the gpu out. The reference card is more for those who want to watercool their card as the gpu waterblocks are meant for the reference card.

Try and get an aftermarket cooler design if possible. It doesn't really matter which one you get as it should be down personal preference on cooler design and size restrictions on your case. The reference coolers aren't good enough and you will have issues with it thermal throttling

4790k is the king of bang for the buck. No beating it.

Thanks a ton! I didn't realize there was an entire video on this!
 
On that note, are there any better, consumer grade CPUs out there with similar prices? Or is the i7-4790k the way to go right now?