Joined on 01/12/06
Excellent Board for casual gamer.
Pros: Slick board, great features, worked perfectly out of the box.
Cons: Crossfire/SLI gimped but you did not see this board if you were looking for a multi-GPU platform.
Overall Review: I wanted to do this review for one reason and one reason only. The manual clearly indicates that slots 2 and 4 of the DIMMS should be populated for Dual channel memory. This is completely incorrect, slots 1 and 3 need to be populated for dual channel memory.
Black Screen
Pros: when It worked...It worked good
Cons: Had the black screen problems so many others have complained about. cost me shipping and Restocking fee to return it. and now am unable to do anything other than wait for a different card I had to order to arrive.
Excellent CPU
Pros: Huge bang for the buck, went from my aging 939 platform to this and could not be happier. Overclock potential is great. Runs 1066 memory speed unlike any other AMD dual core
Cons: stock cooler is terrible if you plan to even do a small overclock. I live in Florida so it's naturally harder for me to keep temps as low as I would like, but even so running 2.8 GHZ with the stock cooler on full load the temps were hitting above 50C. Get a nice cooler to go with this chip if you plan on taking advantage of it's potential
Can't go wrong
Pros: Works like a charm, I saw massive drops in peak temperature vs stock cooler. Running Prime 95 stock cooler 48C - 52C Running Prime 95 Freezer 40C - 41C Those were stock speeds on a AMD 7750 Bumped the speed up to 3 GHZ and temps still never got higher than 42C, now it's time to get dirty and really see how much I can push it for. Price is astounding for an excellent product.
Cons: Clip is cheesy, while it seems to be locked down solid it did not have that positive feel that the clips were in place and locked down.
Overall Review: If you can, polish up the base on this bad boy and use some good thermal paste. I had mine smooth to a mirror finish using a jewelers buffing wheel before I installed it.
Beyond Expectation
Pros: Very sturdy, excellent quality, quiet operation ( I run all the fans at the highest settings and could not be happier with the sound level ) great airflow, nice clean lines and appearance, low cost
Cons: Well I'm not sure why the second drive bay has a large plastic cover like thing on it, ( to hold an additional fan ) but you cant take it off permanently ( unless you were to cut the thing to let the fan power and speed controller wires free of it, and is a bit of a pain to un-clip to get a drive into the bay. Did not come with enough stand-offs and screws to use every mounting hole on the motherboard but again it's not a issue to worry about.
Excellent
Pros: Bright display with nice presets for applications and graphics. Solid stand and sharp display.
Cons: Compared to my 19" widescreen it is lacking a little bit of sharpness but is so minor it's almost undetectable.
Overall Review: Beautiful product, excellent price, I am very satisfied with it.