Joined on 09/03/05
Pros: Cheap. Great RMA process. Lifetime warranty. Fancy looking.
Cons: died after 2 years.
Overall Review: One of the two sticks died after 2 years. No surprise. RMA was effortless.
RMA is terrible.
Pros: Fairly cheap. Good performance.
Cons: 2 months after use the card would crash any games I played and show artifacts during POST. Sapphire does RMA through Althonmicro (dot) com. They also charge $35 and 4-6 weeks return *after* they recieve it.
Overall Review: If you buy this card and you have to RMA it, ask for cross ship from Sapphire. Do not pay a dime like I did. It's their lemon.
Pros: Cheap. Gigabit. Small foot print. Low temps.
Cons: Kind of difficult to get everything on Gigabit. Maybe because I'm running a mix of cables of dubious orginis. Some machines with gigabit NICs still only detect at 10/100. My end though, nothing wrong with this switch.
Overall Review: I have this sitting in the middle of my network. Transfer speeds were ~12MB/sec with my linksys. Now they peak at ~84MB/sec. A solid investment for any network.
Pros: seems to have a pretty good onboard cooling. tonnes of OC options. Pretty stable I suppose. I like all the options, onboard sound, Gigabit Ethernet, 1394 etc. Large amount of memory supported.
Cons: Insatlled in an Antec 300 case that puts the PSU on the bottom of the case, making the 8v connector to the top left of the board a stretch. Had to run the cable under teh video card all the way to the left, definitely not ideal but would not fit any other way.
Overall Review: Make sure to download all the new drivers from the manufacturer's site. LAN, chipset especially are not stable ont eh disc, at least not for me. I had several BSODs for the first week until I got all the drivers updated.
Stable
Pros: Cheap, stable and quiet. On / Off switch
Cons: won't wash my dishes
Overall Review: Running on a a Gigabyte EP35-DS3R. 4 hard drives, a p4 2.8 and 1 GB memory running Windows Home Server. Has run flawlessly.
Good for WHS
Pros: 8 x SATA ports, 8 x USB ports
Cons: no onboard video, no 1394
Overall Review: This replaced my Poweredge sc420 as my Windows Home Server because it has so many onboard SATA ports. In case I fill up all 8 SATA ports there are lots of USB ports for expanded external storage. I think it should be noted that 6 x SATA are Northbridge controlled and 2 x SATA have a Gigabyte chip to control them. I didn't install the power saver features.