Joined on 10/27/04
Great RAID Card
Pros: Supports SATA2
Cons: The BIOS setup is a little odd. As many others have stated you have to flash the BIOS with the correct version for the functionality you want.
Overall Review: Works great. I was able to install the drivers and flash the card with the RAID BIOS. I rebooted and moved my current drive to the card, and then added my new drive (for RAID1) and setup the new logical device. Computer booted right up, and no problems since.
Good... When It Works
Pros: Cooling via heat pipes, a large variable fan to provide maximum cooling of the heat pipes.
Cons: My fan stopped working after two years. I understand that fans fail, but after looking at the manufacturer's website I am sadden to learn that the stated "6 year limited warranty" (as listed on the details page of this product) isn't really accurate. Quoting from Artic's website (the RMA page specifically): "ARCTIC COOLING grants a limited warranty to its direct customers. The granted period of warranty ARCTIC COOLING offers to its direct customers exceeds mostly the local regulations. The warranty a dealer grants to its customer is not depending on ARCTIC COOLING. ARCTIC COOLING doesn't offer a manufacturer warranty." So basically put, there is no warranty beyond the 30 day warranty that Newegg offers.
Overall Review: I am not asking for miracles here... I know it is just a fan/cpu cooler. However, if they state they have a manufacturers warranty, and then later in the same paragraph say they don't offer one... Well... That just sounds a bit odd. To be asked to pay a premium for a cooler that replaces a part that already comes with the CPU anyways... and then not to offer any sort of warranty on it seems strange.
Okay card but there are better options out there
Pros: Works well enough Cheapest 7950 out there.
Cons: Not performing as good as some other cards. Poor heat sink layout and design. You get what you pay for, I suppose. See other thoughts
Overall Review: I purchased this card to help boost my hashing rate on my litecoin cluster. This card hashes at about 70-100K hashes less than other 7950 cards by other manufacturers. I have a Gigabyte 7950 that routinely does 600K hashes. This card barely manages 500K hashes with similar settings (all other settings and hardware the same). The card just doesn't perform as well as others. This card runs vastly hotter due to the poorly designed heat sink. The heat sink fan is positioned directly over the GPU, which would make sense, but the fan blows air in both directions out of the heat sink (towards the back of the machine, towards the exhaust slots as expected, and towards the front of the machine which does not make sense). This causes hot air to be trapped inside the shroud. This increases the overall ambient temperature of the card and leads to poor cooling performance. I would suggest a better cooling solution, but the poor performance of the card would still probably remain and I can't get past that.
Fine Example of How to Take a Great App and Ruin It
Pros: Through all the other junk they managed to shove into the application, it still manages to print checks. For this reason alone I gave it three stars.
Cons: Pretty much every other useless feature they tried to cram into this application. It is so bad that it should be used in college as an example of feature bloat to computer science majors. Seriously. It's that bad. Hey VersaCheck... I already have an application that handles my books... it's called Quickbooks, and you aren't Quickbooks. You want to compete with Quickbooks? Create another application instead of ruining a perfectly good one that is only meant to print checks and happens to be called VersaCheck.
Overall Review: I have owned VersaCheck for a long time (10+ years). It is an extremely simple application that is designed to print checks on blank check paper that comes with the application (and you can purchase refills too). It was literally an application window with six buttons, and one of those was a "Print" button. It was great, simple and did what I expected... which was print checks out of a printer that I can fill in by hand later. It did this job flawlessly for 10+ years. When I finally upgraded to Windows 7 I was disappointed to find out this application would no longer run under Windows 7. Since the original application was meant to run on Windows 95/98 I figured what the heck, time for an upgrade. When I installed this application and started it for the first time... I can't effectively express the level of soul crushing sorrow I experienced. From the moment the automated (and impossible to disable) "trumpet sound" played, I knew things weren't going to ever be the same.
Very Quiet Case
Pros: Great case with a lot of space. The fans are very quiet and move a great deal of air. The drives mount in the case sideways to allow good cooling from the front fan. Hidden cable management makes this case easy to work with and clean looking inside. Modular PSU allows for you to keep things neat and tidy as well only using the cables you need.
Cons: The case is a little bit larger than it looks in the pictures. Make sure you understand its dimensions and where you will be locating the case. Occasionally when you are cycling through the fan colors, one of the fans will get out of sync (colorwise) with the other fans, so you might end up with one fan on, while the others are off. A power cycle fixes this issue.
Overall Review: Lit fans are a silly idea, but thankfully this model has a setting that allows you to turn them off completely. The variable fan speed is a nice feature, but it needs a little bit more range in its speed selection range. Rear fan isn't controlled by the speed dial, but rather connects directly to the motherboard via a normal fan header.
Understand what you are buying
Pros: See other thoughts.
Cons: See other thoughts.
Overall Review: With regards to the previous reviewers comments... the motherboard has nothing to do with the RAM support as the memory controller is now integrated into the CPU die directly. The LGA 1156 based chips (Lynnfields) do not support x4 DRAM dies, only x8 DRAM dies. Don't confuse single-rank (SR), double-rank (DR), quad-rank (QR) with "x4"/"x8" DRAM dies, these terms refer to different things. Again, RAM compatibility on LGA1156 platform is subject to the IMC (Internal Memory Controller) on the Lynnfield die, and it has nothing to do the motherboard's northbridge because there isn't an MCH (Memory Controller Hub) on these boards. Please understand what you are purchasing before you purchase it. We have several of these servers in production using the proper RAM (x8 DRAM dies) from Kingston (KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G)