Grave

You do realize it keeps people from coming back if the competitive ladder is fucked by it, right? Also deters newer users and inflates ladder ranks. Considering the current state of the game + how long this has been going on for, I'd say it's necessary. It's all bad, no good, and if it's possible to sue for copyright infringement or something else I don't see why they or any other company shouldn't. Especially if the people creating the software are selling it. I've seen worse things done by companies, and how does Blizzard look bad in comparison to Riot just for this?

No, you become an owl. That's why this will sell so well.

Looking at the price, it's for people with lots of money to blow. Possibly for the EVGA fanboy as well, or someone concerned about aesthetics enough that they're willing to drop almost half a grand on a non-server board. Trust me when I say I've never heard of anyone compliment EVGA on their superb quality over other high-end motherboards. It's no different, aside from maybe PCB layers (I have never checked this board-to-board) and their supposedly high gold content, which sounds more like a reason to charge so much more than something that is actually worth $100-200 over the competition. This, to me, has been the case with almost every EVGA motherboard anyway. Just my two cents.

Can someone explain why one would choose an NVidia Quadro over a TITAN Black/Z, or vice-versa, if they're both used for similar applications? Do they plan to have TITANs be the successor to the Quadro cards? I thought the TITAN was originally introduced as a gaming video card. Why don't they just admit they fucked up on branding and pricing?

The R9 270X is a 7870 Ghz Edition while the GTX 760 is closer to a 7950. Atm, either one is ok/worth their price but take this into consideration: R9 280X is supposed to be like, the go-to cheapest card for 1440p gaming that you can get away with w/o sacrificing too much performance. The GTX 770, its NVidia mirror so-to-speak, is a bit less favorable for 1440p gaming but guarantees 1080p. It's also cheaper (or was). So now you're thinking, if the 270X is a slightly boosted midrange card for ~$180, the 760 is the entry-level enthusiast card, the 770 maxes out any game at 1080p and the 280X is the entry level 1440p gaming card, why did AMD release the R9 280? To compete with the GTX 760? There's a good reason for it, besides maybe to compete with the GTX 760. The R9 280 is actually specced like the 280X and is much closer to the 280X than it is to the R9 270X (go figure..). If you consider the fact that the R9 280X was only slightly not worth buying at its inflated price of $305-$330 and the R9 280 is ranging between $220 and $260 commonly (that "AMD drops R9 280 price to $250" news thing is actually old btw, Newegg/Amazon had them on sale for lower for weeks), it's a steal. The biggest difference between the R9 280 and 280X, if I'm remembering correctly, is that the 280X is superior at texture fill rates and its memory bandwidth. However, the R9 280 is so damn close to it that it's basically the welfare 1440p card, figuratively speaking. To simplify this even further, the R9 280 to the R9 280X is like what the GTX 770 is to the 780. One is destined for very high performance 1080p/medium-low performance 1440p, the other perfect for 1440p. This is mostly because the GTX 770's memory bus sucks and can only handle 2GB of VRAM as well as it being very overpriced. So basically, you can pay $220-$240 for what the GTX 770 brings to the table. That's like being handed 4+ $20 bills, for the superior product. 3GB on 1080p is overkill, almost insane to me, but you can support multiple monitors without a hitch and you'll be securing an enjoyable experience with 1080p resolution gaming for the foreseeable future, unlike the GTX 770. All at a relatively low price. Short reply: Compare the 770 and R9 280 more closely than you currently are. Overall performance ranking of the 280 with the closest 4 cards: R9 280X > GTX 770 > R9 280 > GTX 760 > R9 270X. The fact that the 280 is the same price/cheaper than a 760 makes it a far better option, and definitely makes it more worth buying than a GTX 770.. Go with an R9 280.

It's more like unimpressive products, lack of innovation and, quite frankly, a game dev community that is dying off quickly. Good games, fresh games, are hard to pull off. That much is true when you are trying to pull off both. It truly is just a hardware and slight software upgrade from the PS3/Xbox 360. The lack of backwards compatibility and support for 360/PS3 really did a number as well. They're unimpressive because they failed to bring products that were "futuristic" (forgot what I wanted to say here); they've basically done a secondary upgrade to the 360 v2/PS3 Slim/whatever it's called to keep them considered modern. The sad fact is that even with such a simple task as that, it failed. Making money off the consoles shouldn't be their drive, they should be aiming towards making better technology, setting industry standards. With that you inherently make more money, or at least a massive increase in sales, when compared to mediocre products. I don't understand how you can have two separate ecosystems for consoles and personal computers anyway. They're nearly identical, just one has native support for a controller and favors a more casual audience. I think Sony and Microsoft need to get off their high horses and accept the fact that the world isn't as technologically impaired as it was 10 years ago. People aren't that stupid, they realize that everything but consoles has had a massive leap forward in quality from 7-9 yrs ago.

If only they took out all ROG branding from decent products.. The cheesing up of good tech is real, now that monitor looks like it's meant for a 14 yr old boy's room.

This is a more dumbed down version of a UD7 board so it still has that superb quality but is supposed to be specifically for Ghz fiends. At least that's what I gather, and it's at a reduced cost because it's dumbed down. What that means is it's pretty much at the top of the list for OCing, especially since it has added features specifically for overclocking. The quality on this is great, I doubt Asus has a much better product if at all. Do you rank boards purely on favoritism and price or what? They have 4+ Gaming-specific motherboards, a line for non-LN2 overclockers and general PC users, and a lower-end SOC board as well that's more oriented for overclocking w/o LN2.

...But you don't need to open your case, lol. The point of the SOC Force mobo buttons are so that you can quickly press something and reset ASAP before you waste LN2.

I wouldn't expect unlocked Broadwell CPUs until Q2/3 2015, honestly.

The best of those is the Crucial M500, especially for it's price. ~$120 or less is ideal for it but I'd pay $140 for it, probably. The PNY XLR8 SSDs are somewhat comparable to M500s, definitely worth their price. I don't know how much worse they truly are, though. I remember they're rated maybe around 18% below that in read/write of the M500. It's an SSD regardless of that, they're not going to be slow.. Samsung 840 EVO is a piece of overrated silicon, it needs to be on sale to be worth buying unless you buy a 1TB drive. AFAIK nothing comes anywhere near it in performance for its price at 1TB capacities. Edit: Maybe the 1TB M550 does, I haven't looked at benchmarks. Oh, and to answer the question about 120-128GB vs 240-256GB, that's entirely subject to what you need and think you'll use. Don't overspend on SSD storage if you won't use it. If you're gaming, 240GB is probably plenty. I doubt you're going to download multiple 50GB games that would benefit from an SSD's speed (mmorpg's like Aion Online for example - 48GB game). There's always buying a second drive or instead going with a large hybrid SSHD from Seagate. The 2TB capacity is the best value for its space without sacrificing performance or overspending/getting 'too much' space and likely more than you'd ever use even if you torrent a lot of content. More than likely, you'd try to delete clutter before filling that 2TB out with w/e you'd keep. I actually think there's a sale on these drives, I'll edit again with links if I can find. 2TB on Amazon for $116 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EIQTKAS/ 1TB on Amazon for $80 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EIQTOFY/ The 4TB models cost the same per gigabyte of storage as the 2TB, really. Maybe save $5-10 per TB. The normal discount is like 30% on both of these, they normally cost $110 and $160-$180. There's also a steam app that makes it so you can launch games installed on a secondary drive, which removes a lot of the necessity of having a lot of SSD space for gaming, making HDDs an option if needed. Final note: Most of the time, the more space you buy, the cheaper the drive is. Half of the time though, the performance goes down the bigger the drive is which is why it's cheaper. It's not much of an impedement unless it's an HDD/SSHD or you're doing large/frequent data transfer and need efficiency. That's where the 1TB Samsung EVO/PRO comes in handy.

Instantly noticeable on 1080p videos. 15down and (it looks like) I can buffer about 2-3x as fast as I could previously, which is very nice. I'll check out the HTML5 thing in a sec.

Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H / Z97X-G1.Gaming GT.

Looks smaller, by like 15% even with the thick, pretty ugly frame. I'm not digging it. That also looks uncomfortable as hell.

Based on the benchmarks I'm seeing from Haswell Refresh CPUs, I expect the 4690k/4790k to hold a new place in peoples' hearts. They're going to be good, I just know it. The 4590/S is scoring well beyond the 4570/S, talking like +11-13%. If that holds true for the 4690k/4790k and isn't just different binning, we will possibly see 20%+ gains in performance if the silicon is good when overclocking. Can't wait for the debut. People wanted another godly chip for overclocking from Intel and I think it's here.