1 year review

The review is a bit late, since the 1 year was back in August, but work, yadda yadda, busy!

The machine continues to impress. Any issues I have run into at this point have nothing to do with Digital Storm and everything to do with Windows being Windows, etc.

First ended up turning off Turbo Mode for the 2600k due to some instability, but it's very similar to what many of my friends have run into, so I figure I can just do some overclocking the old fashioned way if I ever need it - as it stands right now I have no reason to OC the machine in any way, but I know the components inside are setup in such a way that I can OC at a moment's notice if need be - another great reason to buy DS!

I'm pretty hard on this machine as it serves as a game machine and as a workstation now that I'm working part of the week from home (and if the phones stay quiet for work, it does both at the same time!) Some days I'll have a couple virtual hosts running on VMWare workstation along with my active RDP to my workstation at work, along with whatever RTS/MMO game has my attention at the moment, all running at once. This computer handles it effortlessly.

Then Hurricane Sandy rolls through the East Coast taking out power/internet at our main US office, and while our production hosts have offsite redundancy, our test lab does not. I don't need extra server equipment for my testing hosts - I just have my main DS rig which got me through the storm (as soon as my power/internet was back, of course), and it got a couple of my coworkers through the storm too. Someone needed a fresh test host for a high priority call that just came in? VMWare workstation is ultra snappy on this beast, snapshot to a clean host, start it up, and we're back to troubleshooting business as usual. This machine is honestly THAT good.

Other than regular cleaning, I have had no reason to open up the machine for anything, ever. Nothing has needed replacement, nothing has needed repair. Flawless performance hour after hour everyday. Simply put - buy DS and have no regrets - it really is that easy.

Simply for reference, my 6 month review is here: http://www.digitalstormonline.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=17035&KW=