Joined on 01/21/04
Nice little box
Pros: Very tinkerable, great community support with alternative firmwares. The stock firmware is nothing to shout about but it does what it says on the box. Having tinkered with a few I have settled on the semi-official R20 firmware which pretty much rocks the box. If you know a little about linux and are comfortable with telnet and busybox then you will be at home with this media player. I have it hardwired into my network on a GB switch with access to my media shares on my other machines, plus an internal 500GB Spinpoint drive. Setup of mountable nfs shares can be achieved and acess to things like Youtube etc are built in. UPnP operation is very straightforward and it will work with WMP 12 and Playon as the server. The aios can also be configured as a UPnP server itself. Video playback in all the formats I have tried is excellent and in certain areas puts my quad core HTPC to shame, especially with mkv files.
Cons: The built in internal memory is approaching it's maximum capacity as firmwares are released with out of memory errors being reported in some cases. The GB lan connection whilst perfectly suitable for streaming video is badly bottlenecked by the hardware and by the HDD interface in the box especially if your HDD is not ext3 format. For maximum throughput and to alleviate space issues the internal HDD should be formatted as ext3 with a swap partition activated. This also improves the throughput on the USB 3.0 port.
Overall Review: If pivosgroup continue with this product then I think they should probably think about increasing the available memory onboard or allow it to be user expanded. The community around this device is extremely helpful and pivos themselves seem to be very responsive to help requests and wishlists. This item was a replacement for an Argosy HV335T which served me well for 3 years until it died, it is a very capable replacement and the tweaks and interface make it a much better user experience. It certainly passes the wife test in terms of usability.
Deader than a very dead thing
Pros: Worked for 5 months
Cons: Worked for 5 months
Overall Review: Completely dead, not even a hard reset did anything. Upon performing a post mortem there appeared to be a very slight smell in the box. I'm wondering if the fan or something else burnt out. If you need to open the box be aware the screws are mounted under the feet and a fifth one under the label. I also needed to get into mine to get at the HD as I had some material on there I needed to get to.
Easy install, good features
Pros: This review is for the GIGABYTE B650M GAMING PLUS WIFI Good Price XMP worked flawlessly Cloned boot SSD from an AM4 Ryzen 5 1600 system booted after a boot repair, with a little work system was up and running as before but on an AM5 mobo with an 8400F Even with a janked old 1050 video card I was getting reasonable Passmark scores.
Cons: Not really a con but more a PSA, I matched this with a Peerless Assassin 120SE and I'm getting very good temps, the hardware and the memory position make it necessary to adjust the Peerless Assassin's Fan mounts. It still gives stellar performance just a bit finicky to get set up. The presence of Norton in the Gigabyte software was irritating and I only just caught it before it installed it's bloat on my nice new machine.
Overall Review: I got this as part of a combo deal with 32GB of 6000 memory. Very good deal for this mobo and memory. It replaced a venerable ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming K4 that I had purchased in 2017 along with a Ryzen 5 1600. This was mounted in a meanit 4PM series - 4PM ARC RED case with a bunch of Corsair RGB fans and strips. The ASRock was beginning to show signs of old age with random reboots and general untrustworthiness as to its stability. Straight out swap with this mobo, 32GB 6000 DDR5, 2x1TB Gen 4 SSDs, and everything after a couple of hours messing about is working as it was. This is a great upgrade, I hope it will last as long as the ASRock.
Does what it says on the box
Pros: Fast and appears to use the 4 x4 interface to the full.
Cons: Only con is a minor one, there was no mounting screw.
Overall Review: Would I recommend it? Most decidedly yes. The drive is fast and so far appears to be reliable the attached pictures are the Crucial T500 2TB, a Samsung P980 Pro 1TB and an MSI M390 1TB. The Crucial and the P980 Pro were benchmarked on the same M.2 port in my main desktop machine. The MSI M390 is a PCIe 3x4 drive and this is reflected in the numbers. The Samsung and the Crucial are in the same ballpark but the Crucial is about 10% faster across the board. The MSI numbers are here purely to compare a 3x4 with a 4x4 drive on the same system. and the difference is marked. Both of the 4x4 drives slaughter the MSI 3x4 with the Crucial T500 2TB coming out on top. One of the things I noticed with the Crucial T500 2 TB was during the cloning process. In the past cloning boot drives has always been problematical for me even using tools such as macrium reflect. This time, however, the cloning process 100% worked without any problems at all. Usually I have to boot into a macrium flash drive to fix partition allocations and such like but this one just worked. The only other thing I noticed was that the enclosure I used to house the T500 got very warm indeed during the cloning process, having said that this is probably a sustained load that it wouldn't encounter in daily usage. Would I purchase this product again? I the price vs performance was right I would buy it without hesitation. How would I change the Crucial T500 2TB? I'd include mounting hardware!
does what it says on the box
Cons: None
Overall Review: Great response from Jacobsparts when there appeared to be delivery problems. All went smoothly after that.
So Far So Good
Pros: Cheap Fast
Cons: No M2 screw
Overall Review: I did some comparisons with a 980 evo I have and at half the price the Spatium did very well. You can see the result of one run in the attached picture. It's not as fast but to be honest in terms of cost you can't be disappointed.
Responded quickly
I appeared to have a delivery problem with this item, but the seller responded promptly and issue was resolved. I will certainly use them again should I need to.
Good fast dispatch
No criticism of their delivery. The case itself is basic but functional.
No problems, efficient
Would recommend, and I would certainly buy again should the right deal appear.