Pros: Fast, generally stable. My first Biostar board that I bought to recycle spare Athlon 64 & DDR 400 memory. Onboard video is okay (only tested at 1280x1024). System hardware runs fine with Debian/Ubuntu flavors of Linux, including NVidia drivers for X.

Cons: Can't run memory at full speed. Needed to back off from DDR400 to DDR333 to avoid random lockups (symptom: jaggy horizontal lines across display + completely unresponsive system). The northbridge chip (as noted by others) runs pretty hot (43 degree C package temperature). Consider using a heatsink. There are a bunch of tall electrolytic caps next to the CPU socket that can interfere with the CPU fan. I had to gently nudge them out of the way.

Overall Review: Even with the downgraded memory speed this makes a reasonably zippy Linux box. Needed to tweak the vertical scan rate on video to work with my LCD monitor (using 75Hz rather than 60).

Pros: I've heard that most folks who use the unmodified unit can get it to work reliably with "modest-sized" (<= 500GB) USB drives. Just be sure to have an empty drive, and format it using the NSLU2. Don't expect to just plug in a single NTFS drive and have it work. You _can_ plug in two drives, and then one of them can be NTFS. See "other thoughts" on what happens if you just use a single NTFS volume. I got better results by replacing the standard firmware with Debian Linux. This little guy is now a file server, time server, and print server for a handful of Windows and Linux boxes. This little guy will handle big backups (60+ GB) as long as you aren't in a huge hurry. Run them at night.

Cons: The default firmware is challenged, and hasn't been updated since 2005. I was getting really frustrated with its poor reliability with a large (750 GB) disk, which is when I started using Debian. Not too speedy. Expect about 3MB/second throughput on writes. The factory firmware doesn't appear to stay synchronized with a network time source. This can be a problem if you depend on file time stamps to tell which version of a file is newer.

Overall Review: If you do try to simply use a single NTFS drive with the standard firmware you might get it to kind-of work, but you will be puzzled (as I was). You won't be able to change the admin password, create users or groups, or manage permissions. You'll be stuck with the default admin account and a factory-default password. There's a large community of folks who support this thing with after-market software, and you'd be amazed at what folks do with it. I have several projects in mind myself, and will probably buy a few more of these. If you like tinkering it's an incredible deal.

Pros: It's fast, quiet, and reliable. Faultless connections with eSATA and USB 2 or 3. The drive tray is easy to install and remove. Great solution for that additional OS or external backup.

Cons: It doesn't hold even more drives?

Pros: It didn't go up in flames when I plugged it in.

Cons: DOA Oh, and did I mention it was DOA?

Overall Review: I wanted a simple board for a simple build. Nothing fancy. I'd bought ASUS in the past and had no trouble with it. But this toad was as dead as a doornail --- no video, no beeps, no nothing. Lights on, nobody home. Went to the ASUS support site, did the drill, and their suggestion was "return for refund", which is what I'm doing. Think twice before ordering one of these.

Pros: I just plugged it in and it worked. Gotta love that. Solid construction. Very quiet. The fan is located on the bottom of the unit and blows up: hot air exits from the back. This keeps the little noise the fan does make inside the case. No noises from overloaded coils or transformers either (always a bad sign). The wires are bundled with black sleeving to keep things tidy. The connectors high quality.

Cons: None really. It does give off a bit of heat, but that's what you get with a power hungry CPU and video card.

Overall Review: I purchased this to replace the original system PS which died after two years. I only wish I'd bought one of these to start with. Since replacing the original supply the system is almost silent. (The system also has a quiet CPU fan.) Newegg rocks again: great selection and fast shipping.