1st DS system

Received my new DS box on Monday and tis a thing of beauty, as well as being a frakking monster of a case

Base config: Dreadnought
   Cooler Master 942 HAF X
   Intel i7 3829 Quad Core (4.2Ghz OC)
   Asus P9X79 Deluxe mobo
   16GB 1600Mhz DS Certified RAM
   Corsair Pro Silver 1050 HX PSU
   256Gb Samsung 840 Pro SSD
   x2 Geforce GTX 670 4Gb (SLI)
   Noctua NH-D14 (Air Cooled)
   Additional 200mm top case fan
   Win7x64 Pro
   Asus VG248QE monitor
My adds:
   x2 7200rpm 1Tb Seagate Barracuda SATA III HDDs (RAID 0)
   x1 7200rpm 2Tb Seagate Barracuda SATA III HDD
   Roccat Kone XTD mouse
   Logitech G110 keyboard

I can only work on it for a few hours at a time after work, so i'm REALLY looking forward to the weekend and some uninterrupted time with the beast. First impressions and activity so far...

Packaging was well done, which was very good since it shipped from left coast to right coast. After popping the case i was immediately impressed with how "clean" the interior layout was. Cable management on the backside was nicely done, if tightly packed. Unfortunately i pretty much had to undo it all in order to install my Barracuda drives On the plus side, i noticed that 6 of the 8 SATA ports already had cables attached, which i hadn't expected. I made a quick call to tech support to make sure i knew what plugged in where (they were patient with me ) and easily installed all three Seagate HDDs. DS left one of the SATA data cables and the SATA power ports easily accessible (perfect!) and also left the Marvell controller SATA ports open (perfect!) which made setting up hardware RAID simple enough after a second quick phonecall to tech support to walk through BIOS and Windows settings (perfect!). My cable mgmt isn't as pretty as DS, but a few zip ties later and it was time to put power to it!

Power up was smooth and the beast ran quietly, waiting for me to hurry up and put it to work... I went through BIOS and Windows settings to adjust things to my preferences, set up a couple of user accounts, as well as installing device drivers for keyboard and mouse. Everything went completely unremarkable (perfect!). Last step was installing firewall and antivirus software along with one game that stresed my current setup just to test the graphics, which were beautiful (perfect!). The only (very minor) quibble i've run into so far is the time it took to download and install 118 Windows patches for 600+ Megs. That might not sound too bad, except i don't have a broadband connection, just a cell connection. Not sure there was anything DS could have done about that, however, so it's not a gig on them.

Tonight is the install and test of a few high-graphic games at higher refresh rates on the ASUS monitor. I have confidence that the count of "perfect!"s will continue to go up. Wish me luck!