Pros: Fast and reasonably quiet. I find that fan noise is only noticeable above about 60% on my system, and it stays well below this during normal operation (not gaming).

Cons: I've found that I must underclock this card to 700MHz to get it to run stably in Crysis. My system is well-cooled (system temps are around 40C and CPU temps around 35C at maximum load), but even if I manually set the fan to 100% I get display corruption at full clock speed. This corruption occurs when Catalyst is reporting the card temperature to be about 70-72C maximum at 750MHz. With it underclocked to 700MHz maximum temp is around 65C, and I don't see corruption. However, I'm finding that 700MHz gives acceptable performance.

Overall Review: Fan control and overclocking is easy using AMD's Catalyst control center. I'm running this with Vista X64 and the 8.10 Catalyst drivers. My system has 4GB RAM, and a Q6600 CPU at stock clock speed. Most of the reviews I read for this card and other 4870 cards seem to indicate I should not get corruption at 72C, so I wonder if there is a problem with my card. This seems especially possible since others are reporting good overclocking with this card.

Pros: PCI 2.0 is the big advantage of this card since there is minimal support for Sata 6Gbps in drives and enclosures right now. This should allow a 1 lane PCI 2.0 card to -almost- max out 2 ports at 3Gbps, bi-directionally.

Cons: - Very slow under Ubuntu 9.10. It is using the AHCI driver, but is maxing out at about 10MB/s both read and write. I get more than 150MB/sec with an older Silicon Image 3132 card in the same system. - Open Solaris AHCI driver does not support port multiplier on this card. Very possibly an issue with the driver, it is relatively new to support port multipliers with AHCI.

Overall Review: Only one egg from me since I need this for Linux and its performance is far too low to be acceptable there. There are cheaper alternatives with much better performance. I did not test under Windows, likely the drivers are more solid there but I can't really say and it wouldn't help me. I have not tried to track down why the performance is bad under Linux. Could be a PCI 2.0 support issue, an AHCI driver issue, etc.

Pros: Small form factor, and reasonably quiet for the size. Dual eSata ports that -should- support FIS port multipliers. Good average power consumption.

Cons: - Build quality was so-so. Power button stuck on 1st unit I got, and CD connection plate was also misaligned on that unit. - Unreliable port multiplier support. Does not reliably detect drives, loses drives while running, etc. - Hangs while trying to install Windows (I tried XP, Vista, 7) and Open Solaris. CPU compatibility issue?

Overall Review: I spent a month trying to get this to work, without success. I like the form factor, and the relatively low noise is OK for me and I really wanted it to work. Two major issues: I could only successfully install Linux (ubuntu) on the system and could not install Windows (any version) or Open Solaris (which I wanted to run on this). CPU and memory tests ran great from linux, but something caused a hang for both Windows and Solaris installs. New Egg provided their usual terrific support, so I'm only out my time...

Pros: Good feature set, too bad many features don't work.

Cons: Key features don't work. Frequently changes skype sound settings to incorrect values. Interrupts calls with 'line disconnected' messages when no line disconnect actually happened. Not compatible with Windows Fast User Switching. Crashes skype frequently. Many random glitches. Very poor product support.

Overall Review: I strongly recommend against purchasing this product. It's description sounds good, but it does not actually work and there is virtually no support for this product from the company. I find that because of its frequent crashes, restarts, and incorrect automatic changes to skype configuration values that I have access to skype through this product less than 5% of the time it is running. Its incompatibility with basic Windows features also makes it unusable.