Joined on 01/10/04
Work Like a Charm
Pros: The board worked like a charm. I droped an old Core 2 Quad in with 8GB DDR3 1066 RAM. Everything worked on the first push of the button.
Cons: I did not like the book for the MB. It did no have a complete board layout like I am used to with Intel and Gigabyte has. I do not understand why they located the Audio Connector that is used to connect the front case audio connectors at the very back of the board almost under the video card. First this made it difficult to connect if the video card was already installed or is you installed the video card after connecting this cable then you have to work around this cable. In addition, if you wanted to install a video card and a PCI expansion card this audio connector cable runs in between the two cards.
Not Good
Pros: None
Cons: I thought that I had found a good small GIG-E, SATA, SAN for my home network. I had two 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar HD installed. All went easy with the HD install. It ran for a week then the Power Pack blew. As soon as I tried to return it; “mind you that I have only had it for one week.” It said that the manufacture no longer covers this for warrantee. Second. Make sure that if you have anything on the drives that you want to keep. Prior to installing them, regardless if you plan on not running them in a RAID configuration or not, make sure that your data is backed-up. Once they are installed and turned on it will format them and all data will be erased. So, make sure that you have your information back-up. Lastly, when it did work and someone was accessing the data on it then it seemed that no one else would be able to access the data until they were done.
Overall Review: You are better to just put your HD’s in a cheap old computer that you have laying around. If you need SATA and you want to run RAID of some type Promise STAT PCI add-in card is a good option at a fraction of the cost.
Smoking Fast
Pros: This processor you can not beat for the current price. It is fast with 64 bit support. What else needs to be said?
Cons: None that I can think of.
Overall Review: I have both AMD and Intel processors... Currently Intel is winning the processor war by producing stable fast processors that are down right cheap in price.