Liang C.
Joined on 10/25/10
- 6
Hard to manage SATA Connectors
Pros: Works as it should.
Cons: 8 SATA connectors in two strings of four each. The connectors are upside down so you have to twist them 180 degrees to plug into a CD/DVD burner or HD. Unfortunately, the wires are short and stiff between the neighboring connectors in a string, making it difficult to use more than one, even in a large size case with a lot of room to maneuver. It will probably work better if you have a bottom mount case. While this PSU is pretty quiet at idle, it emits a low level high pitch whine from time to time, not enough to RMA it, but a little annoying nonetheless.
Very Slow Write Speed
Pros: Small size. Good read speed.
Cons: No LED indicator for read/write activities. Very slow write speed. Copying a 2GB file from SSD, this Patriot USB 3.0 drive only gets 5.9 MB/s write speed according to Windows 7, while my ancient (7 year old) USB2.0 flash drive manages to get 8.8MB/s.
Slow read speed
Pros: N/A
Cons: While write speed is good for HD video recording, the read speed is well below spec, quite noticeable when copy a full 64GB of video from the card to a computer equipped with fast reader.
A few quirks
Pros: N/A
Cons: While the board works as it should, there are a few quirks: 1) The back plate is too thin and bulges once installed. Had to spend more than half of an hour to flatten it so it does not interfere with plugins. 2) Front facing SATA and USB3.0 plugs are hard to use in a smaller case. 3) Built-in video is disabled once a PCI-e video card is plugged in. 4) Unlike some other manufacturers, MSI BIOS does not have built-in explanations of various options, manual is rather useless in that regard too. 5) Does not come with the SLI bridge shown on Newegg product photos. A case of false advertisement IMO.
Average Performance
Pros: Works.
Cons: Buggy Asus MB utilities. Slow SATA speed, SSD performs roughly 70% of benchmark read/write speeds. The rebate process is a joke.
Poor Burn and Read Quality
Pros: Cheap
Cons: Extremely poor write and read quality. Most of the audio CD's burned with this burner can not be recognized by standard CD players. It also has difficulty reading DVD's that are perfectly readable in my other OEM (HP/DELL/Lenovo) optical drives. Definitely worse than other optical drives I have owned. Very loud when burn/read CD at >x16 speeds. Not worth the cost of RMA.