Joined on 05/02/02
Good case, only OK power
Pros: Solid, well made, well finished.
Cons: Power supply hasn't nearly enough connectors. The leads that are there aren't long enough. If you plan on more than a couple of hard drives, get some long splitters.
Overall Review: Considering the price, this is an excellent case.
OK for price
Pros: Decent for the money. Great throughput
Cons: Runs hot. No cooling fan. After 15 months it started locking up. Throughput went to nothing.
Nice little unit
Pros: Choice of voices (human or Text-to-Speech), crisp clear screen. Easy to set up. Nice window mount (makes it easy for me to move it between my cars). Has been very accurate on 2 short trips I've taken in the last week.
Cons: Though other users indicated they got a free map update, all I got was a code update. Garmin wants me to drop more money on either a one year or lifetime update. Maybe this accounts for the drop in price, not sure.
Overall Review: Glad I got it. I have used it to calibrate my speedometers (one car indicates 5mph faster than actual at highway speeds). Nice trip timers too.
Very poorly done
Pros: Lots of features in a small package
Cons: RAID is BROKEN. Have tried to get it working on 32bit Xp and Vista. OS will see the controller, shows raid volume as a drive in device mgr, drive manager won't see it to put a partition on. Nvidia raid tools don't work. 3 different driver versions (fresh install for each, on each OS). Instead of hardware RAID 5 (3 drives), I can only do software striping via the OS. Is also idiotic that the controller is all or nothing on the SATA interfaces. If you want RAID, you cannot run any other devices on the open SATA interfaces. Network throughput seems low as well.
Overall Review: Bought this as a basis for a simple media center PC for a friend. very disappointed. Love Newegg, big fan of ASUS, but this board is a mistake.
Great board, but sound a problem
Pros: Great price. Everything you need on-board. Easy initial setup.
Cons: Asus' website abysmally slow getting BIOS updates. On-board sound has serious issues with Windows XP (SP2). Only 10/100 Ethernet.
Overall Review: If you are doing a fresh install of XP (or new MB on old XP install, for that matter), disable the on-board sound before you start. Install the chipset and sound drivers. Only then should you reboot and enable the on-board sound. If you don't, you will easily get into a situation where the driver is locked at disabled. I followed all kinds of recommendations that others had tried, but the only one that worked was to disable sound, then install XP+drivers, re-enable sound. Otherwise, great little board!
Camera is OK
Pros: Nice menu system. Love the videos it takes. Controls are simple to figure out and camera is easy to configure.
Cons: Picture quality is not good. I've experimented with the various resolutions and ratios, OIS on and off. Flash does not fill well, nor do the various flash settings seem to change that.
Overall Review: In my opinion, merely OK for a point-and-shoot. With all the great reviews, I had hoped for better pictures. My 5 yr old 3MP takes better pictures.