Pros: Good deal for the money. Rock-solid card. Idles absolutely silently about 41C in my poorly ventilated mid-height case with "17% RPM" according to independent monitor program, and fan ramps up slowly to (really) barely-discernable noise in WOW, full-strength options enabled, for hours on end. AMD's 8.12 drivers seem to have solved fan speed defects, on this Sapphire card at least. Got with AMD X2-6000 (3.1) bundle. Ordered Thurs afternoon, arrived here near London Ontario on following Tuesday afternoon in snowstorm (of course). Standard delivery.

Cons: Absolutely none.

Overall Review: There's a 3-pin jumper on the card, top-left of HSF, labelled "PAL/NTSC" referring, I guess, to the European (PAL) and North American broadcast/output signal standards (mutually exlusive). Out of the box it is jumpered over the two left-most pins under the "PAL" portion of the printing, leading one to believe that it must changed to jumper the two right-most for NTSC. INCORRECT ASSUMPTION. For North America's system (NTSC) leave it on the two left-most pins as it came out of the box. Card is nearly 2" longer than the 8600GT it replaced; no sweat in reasonably-sized cases. To avoid problems if you are replacing an existing card, have the new (downloaded) AMD drivers ready on your hard drive (forget using the ones on the supplied CD), delete your existing GRAPHICS (not chipset) drivers in Add/Remove, then reboot into safe mode (F8). Then run DriveSweeper (downloaded previously) and specify which slop pieces of old driver code you want deleted before you install your new drivers.

Pros: Excellent value. Just plain works. Good choice for the casual to heavy user. Wouldn't satisfy a bleeding edge gamer, but this one will cover 95% of users. No need to spend more, this does the job.

Cons: Loading initial motherboard drivers off the included CD is a bit confusing, especially on reboot with the CD still inserted (to put in the next driver), when the CD turns bootable to enable flash recovery, etc. Not the end of the world, but off-putting and definitely not smooth.

Overall Review: This MB, [email protected], included heatsink/fan, slightly raised voltage, ATI 4770 graphics, 2x2 GB DDR2@800, etc. Stays cool with only one slow/silent exhaust fan in the case besides the PS unit's slow fan.

Pros: Two PS/2 ports, floppy and IDE connectors, 6xUSB on the back panel plus another six available off the board. Rock solid board, came with the latest 1.10 BIOS, and everything just installed and worked right the first time in WinXP and OpenSuse 11.1. Wife uses same board for gaming ... same CPU and graphics card, so it's versatile and solid.

Cons: None, apart from the usual observation that small mATX boards make connecting up everything a bit cumbersome, unless you have a minimum set of peripherals.

Overall Review: Used a 380W PS, paired with a 550BE CPU and an ATI 4770 graphics card. Two DVD-writers, floppy, etc., and absolutely no problems. Pushed the 550BE to 3.7 (from default 3.1). Haven't tried to unl**k the 550BE yet, but with Asrock's BIOS it shouldn't be a problem, assuming I won the bin-sort lottery.

Pros: Reasonably-priced basic board

Cons: Manufacturer's site does not list Sideport Memory available on this board. May be NE typo or mis-read, but NE description (red highlights) should be changed to reflect board's actual components. Sideport memory does not materially affect embedded graphic chip's performance, but does provide a welcome boost. Presence or absence has no effect if you are using a discrete (i.e., add-in) graphics card, and disabling the on-board 4200 graphics solution.