I got 5 people and 1 tank in one shot. Love them ballistics

@technobabble EVGA is straightforward. Plug it in, turn it on, and get the drivers. The Factory Superclocked ones are extremely stable and manage to get insane clock speeds. I didn't beleive it when I first saw it, and I still have trouble believeing it but my EVGA GTX 660 SC Signature model will push itself from the standard clock of 980 MHz all the way up to (If you know a ton about GPU's, this number will rock your socks) 1387 MHz. 1387 MHz! And it's Air cooled and has never gone above 70 Celsius. I'm very impressed with EVGA, I'll probably never buy a GPU from a different Manufacturer, unless it has something really special they don't. NOTE: This Pushes the GPU to be faster in ALL ways than a GTX 760. The memory will OC itself from the standard 1502 MHz to 2100Mhz.

@scottalanmiller And are quite notable as some of the best aftermarket cooler producers for AMD and Nvidia, although EVGA usually makes the best Nvidia cards (You pay a bit more, though you're getting the best). Asus could easily buy Nvidia, Asus is HUGE. They are pretty much the top name for anyone looking to spend lots of money building a PC. If only they made RAM and PSUs... You could have an Asus/AMD color scheme all in that slick black and red, without having to worry about optimization or anything.

The Asus Xonar Phoebus is a Gaming optimized soundcard, set up for proper 7.1 Surround, 5.1 Surround, 2.1 Stereo, as well as 9.1 Virtual, 7.1 Virtual, 5.1 Virtual, and Stereo configurations for headphones, and has an included microphone input. All the connectors here are gold plated, Asus certainly didn't skimp on anything. The card itself has a nice looking black PCB, and a very sleek EMI shield on it. The card is internally split between the Headphone/Breakout Box (More on that in a bit) section, and the rest of the card. This allows for a cleaner signal and less interference if you have both a Hi-Fi Headphone setup and a Desktop Speaker setup. The SNR is 118 dB, so as it isn't as good as a few of Asus' soundcards, it's still hundreds of times better than the Motherboard Audio solution that most systems have, unless you spent close to $300 on a Motherboard. The soundcard comes with an included Breakout Box, which is a module that sits on your desktop and has plenty long enough cables to reach the back of your PC and plug into the Phoebus. The Breakout Box and the back of the card itself have a Green LED for the headphone audio out jack, and a Red LED for the microphone in jack. The Breakout module has a very nice volume wheel that is hardware reliant, instead of software, so that in some of those pesky programs where you cannot adjust volume while in use with your keyboard's volume controls (Looking at you, Skyrim). The Breakout also features a "ROG Command" microphone, that effectively reduces up to 70% of background noise. It works to sample all constant noise in an enviroment, and basically mixes the signal to cut those frequencies and make them much quieter. On paper, this is an extremely nice feature, but the microphone has a limited cone of pickup, so if not positioned correctly it can have little to no difference. It can also be used as a microphone itself, but the quality is not terribly exceptional, so I wouldn't reccomend it. The Phoebus is capable of pushing headphones that are Stereo only in a virtual surround configuration, that after around 100 hours of use with my Beyerdynamic, still sounds very convincing as a 9.1 virtual setup. The software includes tons of awesome features, such as Dolby Home Theater V4 and full GX 3.0 and SoundRadar support, DTS Ultra PC II, Enviroment effects, Xear Sing FX, Xear Surround Headphone, Xear Surround Max, and a few more. This card is capable of driving anywhere from 8 ohm Headphones and speaker systems all the way up to a massive 600 ohms. Available sample rates are 44.1 KHz, 48 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, 176.4 KHz, and 192 KHz, all capable of running at 16 or 24 bits. The microphone effects also include the same bitrate settings, and Xear Magic Voice modultaion software, as well as an auto volume adjust (Note, for the auto adjust microphone sensitivity, when used in conjunction with software that already does this, such as Skype, it will occasionally send audio to the person on the other end that is akin to "Taking off". It is extremely loud and obnoxious, so make sure to diable this feature in Skype and/or the Phoebus control panel). It has a PCM1796 DAC, a TPA6120A2 Headphone Amplifier, and all Japanese Black/Gold caps for capacitors.

In the real world, this card is highly impressive in most areas. The sound clarity is Audiophile grade, the surround both virtual and actual is extremely high quality. The EQ of the card, the dynamic range, volume modulation and normalization, bass enhancement, center stage expansion, and voice clarity are all fully tunable, and work very well. The UI is quite simple and easy to use, even for the Dolby Home Theater V4. In gaming application, this card is optimized to give voices crisp clarity, explosions and roars of cars and dragons alike a deep rumble. It is an undeniably large step towards total immersion, and is an experience that cannot have justice done to it by word of mouth. if you have $200 to spend and you've already got a decent pair of headphones, I highly reccomend this card. It runs off of a PCI-E 1X interface, and requires another 6-Pin PCI Power connector to run, which for a sound card is a massive expenditure of power.

But no review can truly have nohing bad to say about this card. This one has a few issues, but none of them are truly all it's fault. When positioned so that there is a graphics card pillung air by it, such as mounted on a slot below a GPU, it creates a bit of static in the microphone audio. This card has a bit of issues with certain games. When in use, some games will be completely unplayable, as in not even able to be launched. The card and sound engine for the game conflict, and create fatal errors that can crash the game, card drivers, or even your entire PC. Fallout: New Vegas is one such game. It can be played again with some tweaking, even if full surround, but that requires nearly 3 hours on the part of the user, reconfiguring the innards of Bethesda's engine to create enough audio threads to work with this card. Far Cry 2 and Oblivion also have this issue, but I have not found anything else that does. I have no other complaints with this card, even after hundreds of hours of use with it under all setting and conditions. You got money to spare? Buy this card

This was my first review, and I'll probably be posting them for every piece of hardware I get to spend lots of time with. I'll keep 'em coming slow and steady to keep content flowing, you'll be getting one a day for a while.

Thanks to anyone who stuck around for this mess! If anybody has anything they want me to review, or wants to know any specifics about any of the hardware I do review, let me know, and I'll do my best to m ake it happen. Thanks again!

EDIT: This card is totally incompatible with any program running PunkBuster with the exception of Battlefield 4. On launch of any such program, your entire PC will crash, making this a HORRID choice for any gamers. Go get a different card for games, this is truly better for surround sound for Home Cinema setups, not gaming, despite the ROG branding.

It seems Nvidia absorbed them and their technology. I wish Asus would buy Nvidia Not that it would ever happen, but I wish.

@scottalanmiller Wasn't VooDoo the first to implement multi-card configurations?

@alexntg Very much brand loyal as well. As far as AMD CPU's, you do get alot more bang for your buck, and their GPU's as of late have been quite impressive, especially the Radeon HD 7990 and the R9 290X. Both cards are extremely impressive, and until the R9 295X, the 7990 was the fastest single card for gaming in the world. But the drivers offer poor optimitazion and sad overclocking features, and every good AMD card I've seen since the 7970 wants to run at 90 degrees Celsius, and will even shut fans off to get itself to that temperature. I would absolutely pick up an R9 290X, if it wasn't for the fact that it is just miserable at supporting Direct X 11.2 Tesselation, and that it doesn't have access to any Market-Changing features like Nvidia does (Except AMD App Acceleration, a mind blowing feature when you see it in use, which is especially useful as a budget feature, as you can buy a horrid CPU and a good GPU, and in normal tasks the GPU will work as a an extra pre-processor for the CPU and boost performance quite a lot). I was really happy to see Mantle coming, as it was supposed to turn the tables, but it just didn't deliver. It raised performance by dropping the graphical fidelity - Something a user can do just by disbling V-Sync.

I laughed too hard at this xD

@scottalanmiller AMD CPU's within the last... 5 years I'd say have not been made well, lots of problems with pins shorting out. Missing tons of instruction sets, unless you buy one of their top FX Unlocked CPU's. As far as tying issues down to the CPU, things like overheating, random program crashing, randomized PC shutdowns at irregular intervals without permission, Windows errors, and on boards with no control chipsets for storage, Miscellaneuos errors with storage, like corrupted data. Crippling Audio Errors in any type of audio solution, random ejection of drives, driver crashes, issues with supporting displays when using the APU Graphics, issues with it not reading any type of media, failure to intialize the processor after booting from BIOS... Lol, shall I go on? All issues I've had, and I know many other people who have these issues or similar ones, and the one big consistency is that they use AMD CPU's, generally on the FM2 or AM2 sockets. Also, with specific lower-end FX Processors (I'm not entirely sure how power delivery works, but I'm guessing that the CPU controls how much power it recieves), the processor will push itself to max load for no reason, draw too much power, and either fry the rails on the PSU or melt itself.

@scottalanmiller said:

@technobabble said:

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/376/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8350_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-4770.html

AMD won that one on price/performance.

Even if you grab the FX 9590, the beast of a high GHz Octacore it is, the 4770K still beats it in all real world applications. And that isn't even nearly Intel's best CPU.

@technobabble I currently use an AMD PC for work and I've had nothing but problems, emphasis on the word "nothing". It's an APU, which I have to say the onboard graphics impress me, but it's terrible as a CPU. I'm moving to the yet-unreleased i7 4790K as soon as it launches on the 25th of this month, on the good 'ol 1150 socket. I have to say though, most people don't know this but AMD manufactures RAM modules, and some of them are pretty impressive. Seen them overclocked to 4133 MHz, and those 100% Purity Aluminum heatshields make them incredibly hefty, very sleek looking, and extremely capable of dispersing heat. I've currently got a 16GB kit for that, but this AMD processor limits it to an 886 MHz clock.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Mike-Ralston said:

I wasn't alive back then lol, but I do have an NV1 with the Sega Saturn controller port in the back in an old Chassis here.

When did they have a Saturn port?

Some of the early ones did.

This one has two saturn ports, VGA, 5,1 Audio out, and Optical Audio.

I wasn't alive back then lol, but I do have an NV1 with the Sega Saturn controller port in the back in an old Chassis here.

@Nic Unless of course you hearken back to the old days, where they used 4 digits as well Or even when they used three digits and between 2 and 5 letters.

@Nic Nvidia's drivers are LIGHTYEARS ahead of AMD's, something else I did forget to mention. But AMD cards still do well even with terrible drivers. I was excited to see Mantle coming, but it seems to make things worse, not better. And Sparc would be nice, but it's not optimized for consumers, so many instruction sets that AMD and Intel use that it doesn't (And the fact that the architecture was concieved in 1987). If Sun or Sparc International throw out a processor that can support standard GPU configurations and DDR3 3000 MHz, I'll buy one as soon as it launches.

As far as processors, I'm into Intel. They're less sloppy and more efficient. AMD has some awesome CPU's for their price range, but if I have money to spend, I'd go Intel. Less cores, less power, less heat, and still better performance. As far as GPU's, the lines are even less blurred for me. AMD has some awesomely powered solutions, that tend to be a bit cheaper than their direct Nvidia competition. But Nvidia has so many of their own technologies, from G-Sync to PhysX, Gamestream to TressFX, TXAA to Adaptive V-sync. AMD just doesn't have Hardware or Software optimization nearly to the level that Nvidia does either. If you're worried about money though, there is no question really, you would go for an AMD GPU. So what's your guys' and gals' opinions?

It wouldn't look as nice. Looking at an extra cost to send it to a shop to have it done. I do have professional grade equipment to do so at my disposal, but it isn't company owned.

The only way to get a Charcoal case in that form factor is to paint it custom. If you think it's worth it. It's a matt coat so in person the orange isn't too bad.

I've considered Smartphone cases, but laptop skins just tend to get in the way.

Never even really payed attention to this series until today, but now I'm enjoying it as well. The High-Realism bullet physics are just so satisfying.