Still at work (on the evening shift) but I can happily say the machine arrived today, and well...tis a bit of a beast
Appears very well put together, wasn't even much in the way of fingerprints/grease on the machine from being worked on. I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, however I will run a full ream of benchmarks once I've got it sorted.
The machine looks very well put together, the only flaw I've found in the build quality so far is what looks like a very very minor flaw in the underside of LCD glass...basically gives the impression I've got a tiny (perhaps smaller than a pixel) dark spot in the far north almost at the top of the screen. It's very hard to see though unless the background is white (I only noticed it because I was cleaning dust off the screen whilst the first bench in the Vantage suite was loading, I thought it WAS dust it was that small!). So even if it is a dead/stuck pixel, I really can't complain too much, its my only minor niggle with the entire thing so far.
I'm running Win7 Home Premium x64, and all seems to be running fine so far, very nippy, fresh install as I wanted to change the RAID0 stripe size from 128kb default to 32kb.
The machine came with virtually no bumph installed as standard Im happy to report; screenshot of Add/Remove included below.
I have run Vantage quickly to check all is working, and promptly discovered either 195.39 betas are terrible, or they just didnt install properly so for now I've whacked 186.81 mobile drivers on the machine. I havent got the 'VantageLOL' or normal pic uploaded to photobucket yet, so you'll have to wait til tomorrow for those as I'm still at work. I might try reinstalling the betas again to see if it goes better the second time!
Here's some initial eye candy, I uploaded to photobucket on my lunch, to enjoy [all can be clicked to see a higher quality 1024x768 version...3000x1600 ish ones from my camera might be a little excessive
]:
Oh the lights on the front, back and a few of the buttons can change colour or 'rotate' as I discovered whilst uploading these
I will be running an extended set of benchmarks over the weekend, including uploading Vantage, HDD readings from HDTACH and HDTune, Street Fighter 4, Last Remnant, Devil May Cry, Unigene Tropics etc, and will get those uploaded either tomorrow night or during the day on Sunday, will upload Crysis if the damned benchmark works this time etc.
I thought you didnt want to buy one of these Marky