Joined on 10/27/02
Good Server Case
Comments: This case is a bargain for the price. 11 5.25 drive bays allows you to run any kind of RAID, and hot swap the drives. I really like this case overall, three things that keep it from getting a 5. No MB tray makes it a pain to install the MB. also I had to dremel some of the metal around the AGP slot, as the VGA cable kept pushing the video card out of place. Lastly you have to recess any CD-ROM drives in order to remove and install the bottom drive cover, otherwise it will not slide past them. Aside from these flaws, the case is great, can't be beat for the price.
Limited Memory Support
Pros: SLI, Sata 3Gb, 3 PCI slots
Cons: This board will not post with 800Mhz RAM in slot 1 and 2. This is really a bummer as I was hoping to overclock and keep tight timings on the memory. The strange thing is that 800Mhz memory will work in the system, but only in slots 3 and 4, and only if you have slower clocked memory in slots 1 and 2. I tried 2 different manufacturers of RAM with the same result; Crucial and OCZ.
Overall Review: I would not recommend this board if you plan on overclocking the Intel 805 CPU as on Tom's Hardware, unless you just want a small overclock or loose memory timings.
Mostly great board
Pros: Nice basic board with mSATA support, SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0.
Cons: Update the bios! Update the bios! Update the bios! If you purchase this board, update the bios first with a USB key. I would have saved myself quite a bit of time if I had done that. I had weird issues booting from USB DVD drive until I updated bios. Unfortunately SATA performance was slightly affected after updating bios. The mSATA port is only SATA 3Gb/s Can't run the board without a video card. It would be nice to lower power consumption further.
Overall Review: Other than the 3 Cons listed above this board is great. I built a killer Hyper-V box with this board: Xeon E3 1330 CPU 32GB Kingston RAM Crucial M4 mSATA drive 2x Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in a RAID 0 1TB WD GreenPower drive Smoking fast performance on my lab VMs and only 40W idle power consumption.
Not a bad SATA controller
Pros: Supports Port Multiplier, The drivers work in Windows 2008 Server Core.
Cons: When you have a port multiplier connected to this card you cannot see the drives in the BIOS and it causes the card to hang for about 45 seconds during POST. Also the RAID management utility does not work in Windows 2008 Server Core as it appears to require a web browser.
Overall Review: This is a fairly decent card for the money. I have not tested throughput as it was not important. I needed a card with a PCI connector, 4 ports, and support for port multipliers. This card fits the bill. It is great for a NAS box as you can connect up to 20 drives with the use of port multipliers
Great drive
Pros: The drive is extremely quiet, runs cool and is fairly quick. When the drive is running idle, I can't hear that it is on unless I get my ear within a foot of the drive. I have 3 of these drives running in a RAID 0 with quiet fan cooling them. These drives feel cooler than a Seagate I have in the same enclosure. As to the person complaining about speed, here is what I have seen. Running a single drive by itself and filling it up all the way with data I saw 65MB/s starting out, and it wound down to around 45MB/s at the 1TB mark. Bear in mind this was copying from another SATA drive, so the other drive could have been the limiting factor. With the 3 drives running a RAID 0 and doing a copy from the drive to itself I saw between 165-145MB/s.
Cons: I did have a little trouble getting 2 of the 3 drives properly recognized (showed as 31MB). I believe this was a problem with the first MB I tried the drives on though. After tweaking the Drive parameters in the BIOS the drives were recognized fine.
Overall Review: These drives are great, they are quiet, run cool, and are speedy enough from me.
Sweet card for Silent SLI
Pros: The card is silent, has 2 DVI outputs, supports SLI and looks cool.
Cons: I have a weird issue when I cut or delete files in Windows where the screen will go black for a second. The screen also goes black several times when accessing the Nvidia control panel. I think this may be driver related, but still quite annoying.
Overall Review: This card runs great in SLI. I have two of these cards and I can run all the games I play at 1280x1024 with all the eye candy turned on and I experience no issues. I would highly recommend this card for someone looking for a silent SLI setup.