Joined on 04/17/02
Excellent Value PSU
Pros: Priced very well for category it falls in. Puts out it's rated power and is quiet. Rosewell brand is competitive in quality and carries more value than most other brands.
Cons: None after 3+ years.
Overall Review: Purchased an put this HIVE-650W RT in service in 2014. It's been turned on and off hundreds of times and left on continuously without any issues. The warranty with Rosewill is as good as or better than the competition since they replace the item with a new one vs. attempt to repair. Never needed any support help or warranty after over 3 years.
Noisey Fan Controllers
Pros: Wonderful warranty, product and stable output volts
Cons: Terrible product updates. Everyone who has purchased these and some of the older TX PSU's complain of fan squeal when the fan is in between off and just starting to spin. This has been an issue with Corsair for over a year yet they do not recall them to prevent folks from having to experience the RMA process and the added work of installing a PSU twice or more.
Overall Review: Amazing to see the lower budget builder series of PSU's trying to sell for $80 to $100. They don't have a long warranty, no zero spin fan, smaller fans and likely much more less inside of the case than the PSU's that should be priced in the $80 to $100 range. My guess is the CS and CX models could sell for $49 and still make a fair profit providing that Corsair makes manufacturing changes to prevent the fan controller from making high pitched squeals, even when brand new !!
Out Of Date
Pros: Great size, nice SSD mounts, 4 of them.
Cons: Only comes with vented top and side panel. Need a no vented version. Has 120mm 3 pin fans, not 4 pin 140mm. Very tight on the left side for cable routing, needs another 2 to 5 mm from the motherboard tray. 8 pin PSU/CPU connection is very tight to route through back of mobo tray. No need for three 5.25" bays these days, 1 will do. Needs USB C up front.
Overall Review: Good overall case however, it hasn't been updated since it was first designed. Corsair sells a high volume of these cases, or did in the past few years. Today, the case is not keeping up with todays hardware features and could use a redesign as noted above in Cons.
Not So Sure
Pros: Has all the latest gear needed to move forward less some of the items mentioned herein. I'm partial to the Intel LAN Gigabit which is a good thing.
Cons: My biggest complaint is limited 4 pin chassis fan headers. This model has only 2 chassis fan headers which limits the fans to two only. Since these headers are 4 pin PWM, I plan to use just those fans yet, limited to two of them. Likely if I used a Y adapter/splitter 4 pin to 2 4 pin the RPM inputs from two fans on one header will cause an issue with the Asus Fan Expert software. Not so sure the M.2 slots need to be different on this board, one is auto select and the other isn't. NVME is fluent these days, why would anyone bother with SATA M.2 storage? Another con is no DisplayPort output.
Overall Review: Would be a better board if they had the latest HDMI version, it comes with HDMI 1.4b, the latest is HDMI 2.0. A few or one more chassis fan headers, two NVME M.2 slots and less USB 2.0 ports.
Great Value & Performance
Pros: Performance for the $$
Cons: None
Overall Review: Would like to see the sales prices fall a bit more now that m.2 is an option.
SSD Size
Pros: Nice combo design. Very simply software, sweet.
Cons: SSD too small/slow. Most SSD's in the 120 to 128GB size are much slower than 250 to 256 GB and up. Transfer rates for the 250's and up are double what this drive can do.
Overall Review: Wait for the 256GB SSD version, if WD will release one.