I used to get a new PC every year. But we’ve so long been in diminishing returns of noticeable performance that I’ve stopped doing that.

So first off, my new monster machine has a 240GB OCZ SSD and a traditional 1TB Seagate drive. I ordered a SATA 6G controller with the machine. Naturally, they had hooked the non-SSD to that (ack).

Second, the machine supports the new AHCI standard which, when enabled, gives about a 20% boost to write performance on any drive. However, it MUST be enabled in bios before installing. If you do it after, you have to reinstall Windows 7 and it's not on by default as I discovered.

Third, while Windows 7 works like a champ out of the box, it turns out that the generic drivers are pretty conservative and if you want to eek out max (and measurable) performance, you need to download drivers for system components like the Intel AHCI Controller (or better yet, an nVidia one), as well as a JMicron controller and of course you'll need the Marvell controller driver if you want to actually access that 6G speed (otherwise it's 3G).

Fourth, Windows 7 still doesn't come (even in SP1) with USB 3 drivers so you have to install them separately.

Fifth, since I ordered a custom system from Cyberpower, the front case USB 3 connectors do nothing because...the motherboard doesn't have any connectors to it, only ones on the back. So I'd need to get a separate USB 3 PCIe card, put it in, tear apart the case to connect those things on the front. Unbelieveable.

Sixth, once you get into looking into updating drivers, you realize that there’s a ton of obscure stuff that can be updated/improved…the network card works out of the box and I would have not realized how much better the specific driver was if I wasn't already diving around for drivers anyway. The difference is how fast they connect on bootup (very noticeable now that I've seen it).

Don’t get me wrong, I'm loving the machine's speed. It's sick fast. 12 cores (well, really 6 but hyperthreaded). That'll make compile speeds insane. And "real world" copy from drive A to drive B on here is about 600 MEGABYTES per second (which doesn't come up often but if you're moving a lot of video around, it's very nice).

And one piece of advice for those of you looking to get a custom PC: Get the quiet components. This thing is quieter than my Mac book Pro.