I just want to remind everyone first and foremost, for the next couple of weeks the majority of stuff I'll be doing on this is writing a lot of text documents and occasionally messing around in Unreal 4. Also, sorry for the crappy image quality. There were more images on my iPod and camera, but one broke and the other looked even worse. Go figure.
Wish I could show you a high quality show of the machine in complete darkness. The lighting is phenomenal.
3 huge boxes arrived at just before 11AM. Installation went flawlessly. No DOA parts, no missing screws, absolutely nothing went wrong. Set up was easy. I need to replace my network dongle (the one I'm using right now is limited to what seems like 200k bandwidth and high latency...), but that's old and so I expected as much. I finished up the build at about 2PM.
I built everything externally first, as it's easier to check for DOA parts without having to then pull them out, and then put everything in the case. One problem I did have was cable management, and you can probably see how I screwed that up. I'll likely have another go at it once I acquire longer cables and more cable ties.
The fans are weirdly not loud at all. Can barely hear them from where I'm sitting.
The Hybrid HDD isn't much special. It's between the performance of the SSD and HDD on startup, but otherwise it's a normal HDD for all intents and purposes.
Idle temperatures are sitting about 30C. I won't push it up to full or do benchmarks for a few days, since the thermal paste generally works better after you leave it in for a while. I was playing Bioshock Infinite at 300FPS on Ultra w/ DOF, so I'm guessing that says something.
Really happy with this build.
