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Heather U.

Heather U.

Joined on 04/20/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 6
Most Favorable Review

Neat little appliance

AOpen Digital Engine DE2700 WW Intel 945GSE Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System
AOpen Digital Engine DE2700 WW Intel 945GSE Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: Small footprint, sips power slowly, dual gBit NICs, quiet due to passive heatsinks, supports booting from a cfCard, great to use as a router appliance.

Cons: The blue LED is super bright and there is no option to disable it, the NICs are Realteks.

Overall Review: Ok, there is little info on these available online so I will summarize a few things for people that either own these already or are looking to buy one. 1. Press delete to get into the BIOS upon boot. 2. You need to have the HDD unplugged if you want to boot from the CF Card. 3. The NICs are as listed from dmesg under linux, and they will run under BSD (ie. pfSense) RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03) 4. It supports a 2GB stick of memory. 5. Quiet boot can be disabled in the BIOS.

Most Critical Review
Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive
Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Cheap drive, silent, decently quick for what it is.

Cons: Failed after 660 power on hours, bad sectors.

Overall Review: If you are running a Mac then it will create stuttering issues if you don't use hdapm to set it to max performance because of how over-aggressive Apple is with their head parking.

It works

Seagate BarraCuda Green ST1000DL002 1TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Bare Drive Bare Drive
Seagate BarraCuda Green ST1000DL002 1TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Bare Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Cheap, decent amount of storage, quiet, sips power

Cons: A little too slow to use as the only drive in a NAS that serves something like a jailbroken AppleTV2. If you try to stream 720p off of it while unraring or par2 checking a large file you will find that the drive quickly maxes out in transfer speed leaving the process wait time to skyrocket. Maybe this is a Linux issue, but it has persisted across Ubuntu, Archlinux, and Fedora.

Overall Review: Decent drive.

It works

Antec Kuhler H2O 620 Liquid Cooling System
Antec Kuhler H2O 620 Liquid Cooling System

Pros: Pretty nice solution, very quiet.

Cons: The instructions suck, some of the radiator fins were misaligned upon delivery, and fitment on the 1155 socket isn't correct - sometimes requiring trimming.

Overall Review: The instructions say it works on the 1155 socket - well, it does but you need to use the 1156 socket holes in the back bracket. On some motherboards (like my MSI Z68A-GD65) one of the bolts for the stock board heatsink requires you to trim the top right corner of the bracket. Also, the bracket will sit crooked.

Rosewill RCX-Z200 - 92mm CPU Cooler Fan - Ball Bearing
Rosewill RCX-Z200 - 92mm CPU Cooler Fan - Ball Bearing

Pros: Very cheap, quiet, works just fine

Cons: None.

Overall Review: Great value for the money, you really can't go wrong with this one if you need a cheap HSF for an old P4 system.