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James S.

James S.

Joined on 01/01/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 5
Most Favorable Review
Antec TITAN650 Black Steel Pedestal Server /Workstation Case w/ 650W Power Supply 4 x 5.25" (one with 5.25" to 3.5" adapter) External 5.25" Drive Bays
Antec TITAN650 Black Steel Pedestal Server /Workstation Case w/ 650W Power Supply 4 x 5.25" (one with 5.25" to 3.5" adapter) External 5.25" Drive Bays

Pros: Big. Power supply able to power 8 SATA drives. Room to mount 2 fans in front front of interior drive chassis and keep drives at a reasonable temperature.

Cons: Motherboard tray isn't removable. Would be nice if the drive fans were included.

Most Critical Review

Misleading

ASUS P5B-VM LGA 775 Intel G965 Express Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
ASUS P5B-VM LGA 775 Intel G965 Express Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Small form factor, supports 8GB.

Cons: Claims to support DDR2-800 RAM, and claims to support up to 8GB of RAM. These two claims are mutually exclusive. No 2GB DIMMs are officially supported, and 2GB DIMMs must be DDR2-667 in order to work.

PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: Does exactly what it claims to do. Works under FreeBSD 7.0 with zero effort.

Cons: None.

2 down...

Hitachi GST Travelstar C4K60 HTC426040G9AT00 (08K1530) 40GB 4200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6 1.8" Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive
Hitachi GST Travelstar C4K60 HTC426040G9AT00 (08K1530) 40GB 4200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6 1.8" Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Nice enough drive when it's working. Small, quiet, quick as can be expected.

Cons: This was a replacement for an identical drive that shipped with my IMB ThinkPad X40. The first drive died shortly after the 1 year warranty expired. The replacement drive - purchased through Newegg - is now dead after 6 months.

Overall Review: Hard drive reliability sucks these days.

XFX PV-T71F-YDL9 GeForce 7900GTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card
XFX PV-T71F-YDL9 GeForce 7900GTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card

Pros: Runs Oblivion. :) The only setting I can't max is external shadows. Otherwise, with HDR lighting at 1280x1024 runs great on an AMD64 X2 4400+, Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, 2GB RAM. I built this system specifically to play Oblivion and I have not been disappointed.

Cons: The dual-width card may make cable routing difficult for you depending on your case. If I decide to do SLI some day, putting a second one of these into my Antec P180 case is going to be tricky.