Recently picked up one of these as well. Regarding the fans, highly recommend using an overclocking tool to undervolt the CPU and iGPU -- reduced temp under lo

Recently picked up one of these as well. Regarding the fans, highly recommend using an overclocking tool to undervolt the CPU and iGPU -- reduced temp under load for me by nearly 15C, runs stable with cpu at -130mV. Stops the fans from turning on as often or running as aggressively. I too was unlucky in receiving a Toshiba as the vendor of my 1TB SSD. There is a reddit thread out there about switching from Intel RST to AHCI with OCZ drivers -- this improved my random write performance significantly. The most annoying part of the system to me is the "coil whine" coming from the internal DC/DC converters. Lots of different pitch and erratic high frequency noises come from the laptop. My colleagues can confirm that my ears are not particularly sensitive to high frequency noise but this laptop is very audible. Just do not feel like it should have this kind of defect on such a high end machine.