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ISRAEL Z.

ISRAEL Z.

Joined on 02/22/06

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 12
Most Favorable Review

The greatest little AGP board

ASRock 775I65G R3.0 LGA 775 Intel 865G + ICH5 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
ASRock 775I65G R3.0 LGA 775 Intel 865G + ICH5 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: - Core 2 Quad support - Official support for Wolfdale (45nm) CPUs(R2.0 supported them with bios 3.30 but not officially) - Works with Windows 7 out of the box. The built in Windows drivers work fine. - Apparently they fixed the slow boot of R2.0. A big plus.

Cons: - Core 2 micro-architecture support requires CL2.5 RAM. Not really a con, just a heads up. - Only 2 RAM slots. - VRMs can't handle an overclocked Quad. If you plan to overclock stick with dual cores. - Max FSB is 300Mhz. Again, not a con just a heads up. - CPUs with 1066FSB will force RAM to run at 3:2 (177Mhz) no matter what setting you select on bios. This is done to maintain CL at 2.5.

Overall Review: I have owned the R2.0 version of this board almost since it was released and this is one of the boards that shows Asrock's trademark ingenuity: imagine a board drafted for Pentium 4s that by its EOL gets Core 2 Quad support. Or a modern board released in 2013 that ships with a floppy connector. That's Asrock for you, always thinking of the quirky customer. The first system I build with this was a Pentium D805 overclocked beyond 4Ghz (FSB was 205 or so) plus an AiW X800XT AGP from a previous build. Those were the good days. We thought AGP would hold on for another 10 years or so (lol, yeah right). I later replaced it with the Conroe865PE when I upgraded to a Core 2 Quad (the VRMs on the 775i65G couldn't handle the overclock) but I still have it in use paired with a Pentium E5800 (wolfdale) and a HIS HD4350 AGP in a low profile case. It sees some action when my brother comes over to play RTS vs me. This re-release certainly is something else: who would think of releasing an AGP board on the year 2013? No joke, I'm tempted to pick one as a backup for my R2.0. It looks godly in black. I would LOVE a re-issue of its big brother, the Conroe865PE. Still have mine. Review is for the R2.0 but the layout and components seem to be the same so I think pros and cons still apply.

Most Critical Review

Not really 460w...

Cooler Master Elite Power - 460W Power Supply
Cooler Master Elite Power - 460W Power Supply

Pros: - Cheap - Cables are enough for a mid tower system

Cons: Not a 460W unit as advertised. Says right there in the specifications label (5th picture): "The +3.3V & +5V & +12V total output shall not exceed 377.9W". 377.9W (3.3V+5V+12V) + 9.6W (-12V) + 12.5W (5VSB) = 400W.

Overall Review: Notice how the big "460" in the label doesn't have a "W". It's that way so that when you ask they can say: "The 460 is the model number, not the wattage". Although the PSU is fine for my purposes, I don't like those kind of tactics.That I would expect from a el-cheapo, no-name brand but not Cooler Master. How hard is to put trustful information on the specification's label? 3 eggs less for that!

Re-review with latest legacy drivers

HIS Radeon HD 4670 1GB DDR3 AGP 4X/8X Graphics Card H467Q1GHDAP
HIS Radeon HD 4670 1GB DDR3 AGP 4X/8X Graphics Card H467Q1GHDAP

Pros: - Best 4670 AGP card - IceQ cooler keeps things cool and quiet - Legacy drivers from AMD.com work now!

Cons: - Extremely high price

Overall Review: I made a Windows re-install on my AGP system and I'm happy to find out that AMD finally corrected their legacy drivers. 13.4 Legacy work fine with this card, previously you had to use 12.4 because >12.6 didn't have the correct FIDs for this (or any) AGP card and so the installer didn't detect them and the driver install would fail. 13.4 is still old, I know, but at least it works now and you don't have to jump trough loops to get a working driver since AMD no longer lists previous releases on their driver page.

12/21/2014

Good budget USB 3.0 drive

Kingston DataTraveler 111 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive DT111/32GB
Kingston DataTraveler 111 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive DT111/32GB

Pros: - Good transfer rates over USB3.0, 50MB/s write, 160MB/s read (when reading/writing from an SSD) - USB2.0 speeds close to high end 2.0 sticks: 20MB/s writes, 30MB/s reads - Standard USB stick size. Doesn't get lost in your pocket or anything.

Cons: - Nothing really. You're buying a budget 3.0 stick.

Overall Review: This was one of the first USB3.0 sticks available from Kingston and I absolutely love it. At first I wasn't that impressed because the USB2.0 transfer speeds are nothing to write home about, although they were on par with good USB2.0 sticks but once I got an USB3.0 motherboard, oh boy! Also I saw that I was limiting the read speed since on an HDD I was getting 60MB/s reads but once I got an SSD the transfer rate went to 160MB/s. Yeah, there are faster drives but they usually go for twice the price of this.

12/21/2014

Best low profile AGP card

HIS Radeon HD 4350 512MB DDR3 AGP 4X/8X Low Profile Ready Graphics Card H435F512HA
HIS Radeon HD 4350 512MB DDR3 AGP 4X/8X Low Profile Ready Graphics Card H435F512HA

Pros: - Low profile - Low power consumption (25w) - DDR3 memory, helps with overclocking - Practically silent

Cons: - Tiny heatsink, gets into the 60C range at idle. - Low fan curve, 25% at 65C. I suppose it won't hit 100% until it gets to 100C or something.

Overall Review: For people having problems installing this card on Windows 7, the Microsoft built-in driver is faulty and will crash on boot. What you must do is this: 1. Turn off the PC 2. Set the HD4350 in the AGP slot 3. Turn on the PC and let Windows load the built in drivers 4. DON'T RE-START when prompted to. 5. Install the 12.4 AGP hotfix drivers from AMD (you can find them in Sapphire's website download section) 6. Re-start the PC. No more crashes on boot. If you already let Windows load the built-in driver and re-started only to find yourself in a crashing loop you'll have to remove the HD4350 and use the onboard video to get into Windows and delete the driver manually (look for guides on "remove ghost devices"). Sapphire Trixx works with this card and will let you adjust voltages too. The card doesn't seem to have much overclock potential but every bit helps, especially RAM as this is a 64bit card. The card is enough for playing old 2008 titles in medium to low settings and even some modern titles too (RTS and racing games mostly, don't expect to play Battlefield 3). Its more or less equal to an X1600PRO so any game that has it as a requirement should be playable on this. System: - Acteck Bern low profile mATX case - Asrock 775i60G - Pentium Dual Core E5800 - 2GB OCZ Platinum EL DDR400 - Kingwin 32GB SSD (system), 250GB Seagate (data and programs) - Creative Xtreme Gamer LP - HIS HD4350 AGP @ 700/750 - Windows 7 Starter

Same as NON PLUS version

ASUS M5A78L-M LX PLUS AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
ASUS M5A78L-M LX PLUS AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: - It didn't took my lunch money.

Cons: - Will throttle 125w CPUs. Not adecuate for CPU intensive tasks. - Uses old VRM design (D2PAK, extremelly hot) - No heatsinks on VRMs. Assume same CPU support as non-PLUS version.

Overall Review: This board has the same components as the NON PLUS version and thus it really isn't intended for 125w CPUs. Sure, it'll run them but will throttle as soon as the VRM section gets to 50ºC. FX-8350 CPUs throttle down to 2.8Ghz (!!!) effectively killing their usefulness. And don't kid yourself, the CPU will throttle almost half of the time you have it working. Throttling kicks in in about 30 seconds with the cores loaded 100% with Intel Burn Test and after that it throttles back and forth every 10 seconds or so. Disabling hardware monitoring in bios just turns off CPU and NB temp monitoring, the VRM monitoring runs all the time (thankfully, I wouldn't want one of these to catch fire). If ASUS had at least heatsinked the VRMs it could have better performance but really, for the VRMs they should have gone with MLPs or SO-8s at least.