Joined on 05/10/05
update to previous review
Pros: decent capacity
Cons: won't stay charged charge rate is slower than claimed
Overall Review: This is an update to my previous review now that I have had it for a while. mine worked fine at first but with occasional use it now does not hold a charge very long. I bought 2 and they both do it. If you are going to use it every day then fine. If not, you have to spend a couple of hours charging it. before taking it out as it starts loosing a significant amount of charge within a couple of days. Constantly having to charge it when looses its charge is probably going to shorten its life too. lithium batteries have a limited number of charges.
Bad connection
Pros: none
Cons: Same problems as other reviews. you sometimes have to wiggle it to get a connection, and the slightest bump and you loose the connection.
Loose and looses conection
Pros: cheap
Cons: loose conection
Overall Review: I bought 4 of these thinking they were the same I had gotten in the past. All 4 were somewhat loose in the port on several devices. The slightest pressure, even their own weight and you would keep loosing connection. It wasn't even good for charging as I would plug in a device, come back later and it had not charged at all even though the plug was all the way in. Even if you verified that it was charging, the slightest bump to the cord and it would loose connection. I'm not sure if it was a bad batch but all 4 of mine were bad.
kills memory
Pros: can run at 1600 FSB like it claims though the north bridge gets very hot (with a 1066 cpu). I'll have to try and attach a fan. I haven't tried to go faster as I'm afraid that it will fry more memory and I'm at the lowest memory multiplier.
Cons: I had some very expensive mushkin 1066/5-5-4-12 memory (costs twice what the motherboard does). it ran fine for 2 days (though the default timings were set about twice what they should be). I tried a lower multiplier in preperation to OC the cpu, and bye, by memory (it fried underclocking or at least stopped posting). Stepped through trouble shooting with gigabyte. Other ddr2 800 memory kept trigering a bios checksum error screen even after resetting bios and clearing cmos. After stepping through it with tech support (tried resetting and various ways of clearing the cmos), they said bad memory controler). I exchanged the board and same behavior with all the memory. I checked the timings/voltage on the ddr2 800 and they were way off. I fixed the timings and the bios checksum error screen went away (voltage was too low but it was working). Now it works but one of the mushkin sticks is dead (one posts, the other doesn't). I'm afriad to go past stock with the ddr2 800.
Overall Review: Board is narrower than spec so the heatsink sits right next to the exaust fan (so much for the larger heatsink I bought). I hope you know how to set timings manually as this board can fry it underclocking. I'm still not 100% sure the memory is dead (acodrding to their memoory compatibility list, 1066 support is terrible), but both sticks worked, now only one even posts so I'm guessing one is dead, and this memory is irreplacable (they don't make it any more). I should have spent more on a better board.