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MICHAEL D.

MICHAEL D.

Joined on 07/12/01

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 8
Most Favorable Review

Good for the price

Foxconn D180S Intel Dual Core Celeron J1800 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo
Foxconn D180S Intel Dual Core Celeron J1800 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

Pros: Cheap, relatively fast, low power

Cons: Latest BIOS has broken AHCI support

Overall Review: I replaced an Atom 230 board I had in an Ubuntu server box I run at home, this is noticeably faster and the price is right. I would have spent almost this much to add gigabit ethernet to my old board via a PCI card so I figured why not upgrade at the same time. I also noticed that the latest BIOS for this P04 has broken AHCI support. Out of the box I immediately updated this to the latest version and then subsequently spent 2 days trying everything known to man trying to get my older SATA drives to boot in AHCI mode. I was convinced my drives were somehow incompatible until I finally decided to roll back to the P03 firmware and sure enough everything works great now. This seems to be a pretty major oversight to release a BIOS without testing an important feature, not that I expected great ongoing support from Foxconn on this it would be nice if they addressed this issue with an update.

Most Critical Review

Changed my mind

Foxconn D180S Intel Dual Core Celeron J1800 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo
Foxconn D180S Intel Dual Core Celeron J1800 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

Pros: Cheap, pretty fast

Cons: Quality control

Overall Review: Originally I gave this 4 stars until I realized that rolling back to the P03 BIOS to allow AHCI mode to function broke the ability to boot this as a headless system. Somehow having no monitor attached causes it to hang on boot. I contacted support via email and their response asked me to do a bunch of nonsense like reinstall the OS when the problems I'm having are clearly BIOS related and nothing more. Pretty sure this is going to be returned for another board, I can't justify keeping this after the return policy ends on the hope of a BIOS update coming out.

11/10/2014

Fast but runs crazy hot

Rosewill RX82-MP-SUF82-SLV Aluminum 2.5" Silver USB 2.0 & 1394bx2  External Enclosure
Rosewill RX82-MP-SUF82-SLV Aluminum 2.5" Silver USB 2.0 & 1394bx2 External Enclosure

Pros: Fast, very solid build quality, great connectivity options. Matches my Macbook Pro..oh boy.

Cons: Runs VERY hot, this is unique to this enclosure. I had the same HD (Seagate 500gb) in a $5 USB enclosure and it ran quite cool, moved it into this enclosure and it's now a space heater. Yeah yeah the aluminum is dissipating the heat and all that good stuff, but there's something about the chipset in this that is running extremely hot and it is concerning me.

So-so headphones

Sennheiser HD201 Over-Ear Headphones
Sennheiser HD201 Over-Ear Headphones

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Very flimsy build quality, thin headphone cord, mediocre sound.

Overall Review: I bought a pair of these for my mom to use for transcription, she had been using my HD280s and liked the fact that they covered the full ear. I figured the HD201 would be sufficient for spoken word, turns out they don't even come close. These might be ok if you had no point of reference, but I'd recommend investing in a higher quality set of headphones

Great for the money

Foxconn RS233 ITX-Barebone Intel 945GC Barebone
Foxconn RS233 ITX-Barebone Intel 945GC Barebone

Pros: Super cheap, plenty fast for a little linux box. I also like that it has a regular internal power supply, I was afraid of getting a book size PC with an external DC power supply that may be hard to replace down the road.

Cons: Somewhat big compared to more expensive systems, also wish it provided for easier mounting of a 2nd HDD or other boot device (SSD or flash card).

Overall Review: I run Ubuntu Server on this thing and it's great, I drilled out some holes in the optical drive bay and mounted a 2.5" SATA drive to the top of the bay (upside down). I boot off this and then have a 1TB seagate drive in there for storage. I opted out of getting a dual core Atom box because this one is sufficient and uses less power and cost less.

EVERCOOL VC-RF Ever Lubricate VGA Cooler
EVERCOOL VC-RF Ever Lubricate VGA Cooler

Pros: Cheap, simple design

Cons: Did not connect to video card onboard power connector, this seems to be the case with all 3rd party fans though

Overall Review: BEWARE of installing this in a low profile case, I put this on a Visiontek X1650 pro as another guy mentioned, however it is in an Asus Pundit low profile case. I ended up frying my video card, and possibly burning out my pci-e slot (haven't tested it yet)...I'm assuming due to the non-existant airflow in this case. The video card and the case above it became too hot to even touch and it smelled vaguely like fried electronics when I opened it up.