That thing is huge. Even by Scythe Mugen 2 standards.

Yes it is. That is the only real "con" i can think of.

i am setting up watercooling next then moving to the EVGA FTW MB.

There should be two evaluations up within the next week. Then back to 'normal'

As in the other post, i am making ONE evaluation to cover the ECS MB and also the IPC evaluation
--"Core i7-920 vs i7-3770 at 4.2GHz featuring ECS Golden Series Motherboard"

What do you think? Is there a chance that the i7-3770K will hit 5.0GHz in the EVGA FTW MB?
-- i am setting it up tomorrow (clean install again) after i take pics of watercooling installed in the Overseer RX-I case so i can show off the ECS MB

Well, you certainly have the heatsink needed to go for 5.0 ghz, I don't know how easy it will be to get there on Ivy though. It isn't straightforward for SB to hit that high (4.8 is where most people end up), and IB is more finicky than SB, so who knows? It will be interesting, but I doubt that it will be an OC anyone can achieve on IB, that will still be around 4.4 ghz like SB, maybe slightly less due to heat imo.

Well, i don't think either the ECS nor the Gigabyte have the fully-featured overclocking tools in the BIOS that EVGA FTW MBs do. It is though Ivy hits an overclocking wall after 4.8GHz. As you can see, temperatures and voltages are quite reasonable with the NH-DH14 at 4.8GHz. But no matter what (reasonable) voltage i add to the core (and i am talking about OC'ing with 2DIMMs, not 4), it will BSoD upon entering Windows at 4.9GHz

i am hoping it is the motherboard and that i can get 5.0GHz. i also hope no one minds mashing the ECS MB evaluation in with the IPC comparison .. they are SO intertwined it would take much duplication of the articles
-- basically it is a lot of comparisons with Bloomfield "featuring ECS z77 Golden series MB"

Only a hopeless anal-retentive would really mind this!

It's interesting how the NH-D14 heatsink actually yielded a 400MHz oc increase over the Coolermaster Hyper heatsink - I thought that the IB was primarily constrained by the craptacular TIM quality underneath the IHS!

Now, can you publish my 2nd "Alien-view" article, on the 2TB HD?

The Noctua flagship cooler is pretty amazing - next it goes up against watercooling. If i can get the Cooler Master Mini case, then i will ask Noctua for their low-profile cooler to review.

We can publish. However, our reach - our audience - is tiny. Under 1,000 (i would guess, regular) readers a day. Before the site crashed and we lost our news, it was well over double what it is now.

i was thinking that once we restart the feed properly (this month) and our affiliates are carrying our news (and we will be carrying their news regularly, as a new ABT feature), THEN we should publish your article. i'd like to have a series of ABT articles go out to our affiliates . . .

But if you want it done this week, i am at your service
-- choose wisely

Yeah, I would like for it to be published now since it answers a lot of the questions that potential buyers of Hitachi 2TB drives are seeking an answer for. It's just that the sooner, the better it would be for a product that really needs the answers.

One thing I would ask of you is to post a link to the article over at HardOCP forum - at that really LONG thread on this Hitachi 7k3000 series drive. So many forum readers over there would appreciate this article.

And I'll also mention AlienBabelTech over at Newegg customer reviews, saying that it "answers all of your questions on this particular drive"... hehe..

Good job getting on their front page