Rab Boreas/Ventus users?

Short answer: It's a handy thing to have and for the price I'd expect you'll be very happy.

Midlength answer: It's a very competent windshirt with middling factory DWR, whose weight and vaguely weird super-synthetic feel are offset by exceptional breathability, next-to-skin wicking and stretchy comfort if you work with Rab's narrow-shouldered fit.

Long answer: the Boreas (and the burlier Zephyr) was Dave C's favorite windshirt ever ("checks the most boxes") before the Rab Alpine was his favorite windshirt ever before the BD Alpine Start was his favorite windshirt ever. ;) Dave knows his windshirts. What I get from the Great Early 2014 Windshirt Thread Jamboree is: after years of dominance, 3-5oz windshirts are suffering as a category from Patagonia's Houdini fabric change, and this has caused people to cast their eyes into the once-verboten 7-9oz category. In that heavier category, the Boreas is something of a gold standard, recently challenged by the BD Alpine Start, which has design flaws and is not cheap.

Personal answer: I've been going back and forth between this and the Arcteryx Squamish since 2011. The fit is odd. It breathes better than my Squamish by a mile, wicks like crazy and blocks wind almost as well. Get it.

I have the Boreas. Living in SoCal, I honestly don't use it that much outside of "winter". I ran the Grand Canyon R2R2R and wore it the entire time: rain, sleet, snow, wind. It dried quickly and breathes really well. It made for an excellent layer underneath a hardshell when things got real bad; never felt clammy in it.

Awesome info. Good enough for Dave C, good enough for me.

I bought it because the price ($63 with 2-day shipping) and the color and the design looked good. I am narrow-shouldered and skinny, so the fit should be great.

This will probably end up being much better than I even hoped, if the specs are really that good. Looks like my cycling/running shirt conundrum is solved.

No experience with these, but looks good enough on paper and in reports. It's funny though, originally i thought people tended to over think the wind jacket thing, but for awhile i started to think, well there are some important differences and considerations to take into account (CFM levels, DWR treatment quality, etc). I started to think this way after reading and hearing about all the awesomeness of the Houdini. And i agree, pre 2013 Houdini is a really well made piece of gear.

Lately though, i'm going back to my original stance in a sense. For example, i picked up some Costco Champion windshirts for 9 dollars. They weigh 6 oz and are made out of polyester. Quite breathable, and look pretty durable.

Now that i figured out that it's not so hard to do an EPIC like treatment for fabrics provided you do it with fabric that is quite breathable to begin with, after i treat these 9 dollar wind shirts with silicone, they will be as good as, if not better than, most windshirts–some which cost 7 to 10 times more *at least*. Perhaps the only thing which will be lesser quality in an actual practical sense, is the zipper. I don't expect it to last long in a reliable sense.

However, thinking of cutting it off and just using velcro. Velcro will last longer than most zippers except perhaps the YKK special vislon stuff.

So, i don't think one really needs to spend a lot of money to get a decent piece of gear in this area, especially not if one is willing to do mods.

I used to go with a Montbell Tachyon and have switched to some of the little bit heaver, more breathable wind shirts.
People love the Boreas, I don't. For real high output this thing takes a lot longer to dry then some of the other ones I am using now (Rab Alpine and some Japanese market only TNF that is amazing). This might be due to the amount of spandex in there? On some of the regular steeper climbs and or trail runs I do, the whole back would be sagging a bit even, and certainly significantly more wet, more than I get with the other shirts.

Yeah, I figured it would hold more moisture, but there's a lot of air circulating around me on the bike so that shouldn't be too big a deal. I'll report back.

It should serve you well in that application Max. The lycra content makes it a bit slow to dry, but the fabric is high up in the survive-a-mountain-bike-crash well category.