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Stephen P.

Stephen P.

Joined on 02/23/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 3
Most Favorable Review

Amazing bang for your buck

COUGAR Spike Black Steel / Plastic Micro ATX Mini Tower Gaming Case with USB 3.0 and 12CM Cougar Fan
COUGAR Spike Black Steel / Plastic Micro ATX Mini Tower Gaming Case with USB 3.0 and 12CM Cougar Fan

Pros: Simple clean internal design, Painted inside and out with a decent enameled finish, Solid (not cheap feeling) plastic front bezel.

Cons: I cannot think of one

Overall Review: This case has a very simple and clean layout, its firm without being overly heavy, and the plastic components are solid and do not feel cheap. It has a great balance of space and proper airflow without being overly huge. Great lan-party size and look. Well-built and not overly complicated. I bought this for my son for a budget gaming build, and was expecting a really cheap case but was hoping it would be useable enough for our needs. I was taken by surprise with the quality of this case, and I had missed that it had a USB 3.0 front port as well. Internal layout is good and overall I think this was a great find.

It even likes linux

Gateway Desktop PC DX Series DX4710-05 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 6GB DDR2 640GB HDD Intel GMA 3100 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
Gateway Desktop PC DX Series DX4710-05 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 6GB DDR2 640GB HDD Intel GMA 3100 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

Pros: 6gb of ram, q6600, SATA optical/hdd and AHCI 95% quiet operation all for a great price very compatible hardware selection.

Cons: The sata optical is a little noisy when it spins up, but this is a minor issue for me as I only spin it up when needed which is only for installs or burning. I also rather dislike the included keyboard. it looks nice but is not very easy to type on.

Overall Review: I added a 9500GT to the machine and installed ubuntu 8.10 64 bit and its working beautifully Hard disk performance wasn't that great under windows, but with Linux running its definitely a windows issue. On an odd note the case has pysical capacity for 6 hard drives and only 4 sata ports on-board, generally if i am going to use that many drives im also looking at a controller to go with, but it was interesting.

Good Bang for buck

HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 PCI-Express x1 SATA True Hardware RAID Controller
HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 PCI-Express x1 SATA True Hardware RAID Controller

Pros: The card is very compatible with a number of operating systems, windows XP 32/64 vista 32/64, Linux. Also very quick, a definite upgrade from on-board. It is also on part with all the big dogs in raid market.

Cons: I was not able to get the HDD indicators working ever, and they were long enough i had to bend them to avoid rubbing/touching the back of my video card. The OS install was very touchy and i had to go with the drivers off the highpoint website, the drivers supplied with the card were useless.

Overall Review: this card combined with a pair of raptors made for an exquisitely fast system, load times were phenomenal, and i was seeing about 98% of the theoretical bandwidth from both drives in raid 0, and when used in raid one the write speeds were normal, but the controller will switch reads to flavor of Raid 0 for great read times. In all well worth the price and i will be buying again. now if only they would make a SAS version of this card.

11/25/2008