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Michael M.

Michael M.

Joined on 08/18/08

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 3
Most Favorable Review

Nice case

Corsair Carbide Series 300R Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case ATX (not included) Power Supply
Corsair Carbide Series 300R Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case ATX (not included) Power Supply

Pros: -Airflow, sturdy, looks nice -Barely big enough to fit an Enermax ETS-T40 CPU cooler, and that's nearly as tall as they come. -You can replace CPU coolers with back plates with the MOBO in place, which is much more convenient.

Cons: -The bottom PSU air filter slides right out for cleaning, but the front one requires you to take the front off and bend some tabs to remove it. -Do not recommend if you plan on swapping HDDs often. The tool-less system works fine, but you have to take them in and out the one side, and it's very difficult to access the cables without taking off the other side panel as well, esp. with multiple drives installed. And the side panels can be a pain to get back on. -The front audio connector cable isn't long enough to reach on my motherboard and still be routed ideally in the back, though it does barely reach.

Overall Review: I don't regret buying, though I was under the impression that the front dust filter could be more easily removed.

Most Critical Review

Buggy firmware

ASUS Z97-A LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
ASUS Z97-A LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: The board seems to work fine once you're booted up and in the OS.

Cons: I have had multiple issues with the BIOS. The settings will often not save correctly until you play with them for a while. I spent four hours trying to figure out why my CPU multiplier and other settings refused to change after a couple days, even after clearing the CMOS. Turns out there is a bug where you can't just delete the text from the field, but you have to press the delete button about 10 extra times to delete some hidden characters before it will work. It also mis-identified my RAM speed, even though it's listed as supported in the manual. Maybe it's just the latest update (1204 as of this writing), but I can't be sure because EZ Flash 2 says that every single .CAP file other than that one is "not a proper BIOS" and refuses to flash.

Number of problems with this board, regardless of BIOS version

GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE AM4 AMD B550 ATX Motherboard with Dual M.2, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2, 2.5 GbE LAN, PCIe 4.0
GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE AM4 AMD B550 ATX Motherboard with Dual M.2, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2, 2.5 GbE LAN, PCIe 4.0

Pros: - Is able to maintain an OK overclock with a 5900x, assuming you have a beefy enough cooler to handle the all-or-nothing choice that this board sticks you with.

Cons: - Like another reviewer said, it was bluescreening every 5 or 10 minutes on a fresh Windows 10 install. Not even possible to update it. Installing windows 11 fixed the problem, but the fact that it doesn't work with the world's most popular OS is not a good look. - If you plan on overclocking using PBO, go for a different board. The options to manually set the limits is not available, the numbers are just fixed at zero. You can set it to "Motherboard" in order to fix all limits at maximum, but this all-or-nothing approach is not good for many people. After googling a bit, it looks like this is a common problem that they introduced in some BIOS update and never bothered to fix. - There are a few other bugs in the interface, like some of the custom fan profiles keep resetting to default when you edit other fans.

Overall Review: There are a lot of problems that should have been obvious with even a rudimentary amount of regression testing. Pretty disappointing from a name brand product.