Joined on 07/11/05
Pros: Great performance, of course anything less would be a sin. I purchased this specifically to handle Bioshock on high settings and gameplay is now very smooth (upgrade from BFG 7590 GT OC).
Cons: This card is very long. Expect to be doing some hard drive re-arrangement unless you have an enormous case. Also, on my motherboard 3 of my 6 SATA connectors are too obstructed to use at all. Since I only have 2 SATA drives it was not a problem but something to keep in mind in a drive heavy system.
Overall Review: The card is essentially just a GTX with a new cooler and higher clocks. Although a GTX could have it's core and memory clocked up to the Ultra, the shader clock is locked, so the Ultra is the only way to raise that one.
Beware of pin-3 PWDIS feature
Pros: Massive 12TB size in a single disk Relatively fast (for a spinning drive) and lots of onboard cache Even reasonably quiet for enterprise storage solution
Cons: Has Pin-3 configured (permanently) as the PWDIS pin based on a new (and terrible) standard; basically if you have a normal SATA power cable that supplies 3.3V to Pin-3 on the power connector the drive will NOT turn on at all. If you happen to put it into a SAS enclosure it will probably work as is though.
Not Impressed with this kit
Pros: The one stick of memory that works.
Cons: The other stick of memory that does not work.
Overall Review: RMA submitted on G.Skill's website. Not sure if easier to deal with on there or via newegg.
Great mid-tower
Pros: Cable management is simple and elegant along the back Plenty of drive bays, this case would be great for building a NAS Radiator mount on top easily fits a 240mm in Push/Pull 4 fan configuration without interference Sound deadening material all over the case Plenty of room to work with for large graphics cards
Cons: The top part looks somewhat ugly with the staggered panels removed, would be nice to have a dust filter component included to cover that part up again
Overall Review: I now regret getting a cooler master case for my file server since this would have been absolutely perfect design for it
Great thermal compound, 10/10, would lower temps again
Pros: * Nice consistency, not too thick and not too thin, easy to squirt out of tube * Great temperatures, the best thermal compound I've used * No break in period, nice temps on first boot * Very reasonably priced, this tube will do a lot of CPU's
Cons: * Was a bit hard to actually get this stuff, shipping seems like it can take a while for it. You're set once you finally get a tube since it will last a long time, but if building a system would be nice to know this would get shipping sooner
Not ideal for longer term use.
Pros: Compared to any other drive vendor, none really jumps out.
Cons: When I originally ordered these I got 4 drives to setup a RAID-5, one of these drives had a damaged sata connector (literally split in half) so I ended up waiting a while for a replacement through Newegg. I also had to aggravatingly ask for them to pay shipping on the RMA label, not sure why that was even in question. Now I have another one of these drives reporting a physical disk failure to the RAID card so the array is in a degraded state. This occurred in less than 4 years under very light use.
Overall Review: This drive was purchased during the massive HD shortage so if you have one of these drives from around that time (after the issue with the factory) then beware of possible issues coming up with these.