Joined on 03/02/03
7 year warrenty and neat modular cables
Pros: Very good warrenty on this unit. All of the cables other then the 24 pin and the 8 pin (which can be used as a 20 pin & 4 pin if needed) are like flat ribbon cables, so cable management is extra easy. The cables aren't stiff at all and fold easily. I've only had it a couple days, so no long term data yet from me, but if I don't post an addendum, assume it's working fine. :)
Cons: Very minor con. The PCI-E cables are dual plug. Why is this bad? If one is using a video card with only one six pin connector, one is forced to zip-tie the other part of the cable to it or otherwise hide it. Not a huge issue since the cables are so flat and fold easily though, but just found that slightly odd.
Overall Review: It's not a bad unit, and despite my very, very minor con IMO it's one of the best PSU's I've seen for cable management, even including other modular units. Assuming this PSU is also stable (which based on reviews it very much should be) I'd very much recommend it, and will look at Corsair PSU's for future builds also. Oh..but no free pie. Someday Newegg will provide free pie.
Good case, but some minor issues
Pros: Okay, to start the build quality overall is fine, as expected from a Lian Li case. even comes with optional handles if one were to use this in a rackmount frame as a small server case. Good fit and finish. But....(see cons & other)
Cons: ...there are some issues. 1) As posted by another, a lot of the cables are short, and I also had to drape some of the front panel cables over a drivebay. 2) Hard drives need a small bracket/handle installed to fit in hot swap bay. I didn't see this anywhere in the documentation. Unless the PC you're swapping to can fit their bracket/handle, you're out of luck unless you want to remove the handle each and every time you swap. (Or I guess if you're swapping to another Lian Li case with a similar hot swap bay). 3) 5.25 inch drivebay is a tight fit. One of my two optical drives took a tiny bit to fit into the case. A devices slightly wider then standard might not fit at all, it would be too tight.
Overall Review: As posted by someone else, the unit comes with a 140mm fan, and a 80mm fan. If you want the other 80mm fan spot in use, you need to buy your own fan. This is a HTPC case so probably expected for most of them but even for a case that takes a ATX sized board it's kind of small. Height won't quite fit a Zalman 9700 CPU cooler, I had to pull it from my board/CPU and use the Intel stock cooler. Clearance is TIGHT between the edge of the board and the front of the hotswap/hard drive cage. If your SATA (or if using it) IDE port is tilted to fase the front of the case, not pointing up this could be a small issue if your ports are behind the hard drive bay. Anyway, the quirks and small problems were enough for me to ding this two eggs. If they had a way to rate this case a 3.5 out of 5, I'd do it. OH..someone posted the remote doesn't work. It does work, and I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate 64. It did take 3 or 4 reboots, but 4th reboot it was fine.
Doesn't seem to be a SATA III docking bay
Pros: It does seem to work fine with my ASUS Sabertooth X79 motherboard's SATA II ports, which use the chipset controller. I have a previous Icy Dock bay that this was to replace that is SATA II compatable that does as well though.
Cons: It has issues with both the chipset based SATA III ports and the Marvel controller SATA III ports. Also, although the description says SATA I, SATA II & SATA III and also says SATA 6.0 gb/sec, the box this came in says a max of 300 mb/sec. Otherwise SATA II speeds. Anyway, I'll rate this 3 eggs since as a SATA II bay it works fine, but this is adverted as a SATA III bay.
Overall Review: This is far from Newegg's fault, but the train that this was being shipped on to get here locally did derail, and thus my package was delayed a day. I only mention this to note that although the shipping box wasn't damaged and the other item I ordered is working fine, it is possible that the item was damaged in shipping and thus why it's not working. Having said that, I do doubt this given that the box was fine, everything was packed well and the box the docking bay came in was perfectly intact. And YES, for the record ALL of my ports are set for AHCI, all of my ports are set to hot swap in the BIOS (mine even has a setting to turn on and off individual ports for hot swapping) so I know that isn't the issue.
Good board, but some minor issues too
Pros: It is a very stable board. Unlike another reviewer, I've had no issues running 2x Nvidia GTX 580's in SLI mode. The install went well overall of Windows..BUT Only due to the fact that I ditched trying to put two drives in a RAID 0.
Cons: As another reviewer posted, it seems like one needs a floppy drive to do a RAID 0 array. There isn't a floppy port on the board either. But, one can apparently according to the manual use a USB floppy. I tried loading in the driver during the Windows 7 64 bit install via a USB flash drive, and it kept having issues, claiming the driver was uncertified. This is using both the latest from Intel for this board (yes I made sure it was. :P ), downloading the one from ASUS and the one of the driver DVD. I don't own a USB Floppy, so for now I'm not running a RAID 0. I MAY buy one later and do a reinstall, but not sure on that at all. Maybe when I feel I need to reinstall Windows for whatever reason I'll give it a go. I did see a few USB Floppy drives here on Newegg so at least it won't be hard to find one, that was a worry of mine until I looked.
Overall Review: I'm happy with the board, it's otherwise very stable and despite the USB Floppy issue with RAID driver installation I'm going to use this board for a long while I'm sure. But again that is very odd, I'm amazed they wouldn't let me do it off of the driver DVD included in the mobo package and/or a USB flash drive. Who knows, I may try to install the driver onto a hard disk and pull it from there, I do have a hot swap bay I could use. Anyway, the RAID driver issue forces me to give this one four eggs instead of five.
Wonderful card.
Pros: Much of what I'd say was already said by PD to be honest. Like him I have an ASUS board (Sabertooth X58) and I found that this card works in my third video card slot. Blazing fast results, and the 512mb cache seems to help even more. Due to the 512mb cache, my read and write speeds on a SINGLE Corsair P3 256gb drive (that's the new SATA III drive by them) are faster then Corsair's benchmark for the drive in Seq. reads and writes, Corsair used the P67 chipset slots on (I think) an ASUS Sabertooth P67 motherboard.
Cons: None really, considering this is the first time I've used a RAID card as opposed to just the SATA or IDE ports on a board, this card was easy to set up. Okay, it is $329.00 as of this moment, but given the speed gains I got I won't complain. That and I always find it silly to complain about price if one is willing to buy something.
Overall Review: LSI will claim that the card is only for server motherboards. Maybe it technically is, but again I had no issues plugging it into the one empty PCI-E x8 slot on my board. Again, most of what I'd say was already said by PD. My only major difference is that I didn't have to flash the firmware of my card, everything was recognized by both Windows and my BIOS. My next major purchase will be when X68 boards and socket 2011 CPU's come out, I do suspect that I'll be installing this card into that build.
Pros: It's a cable, what more needs to be said? Okay, it is fairly long, I didn't measure it but I have plenty of length left over from going to the RAID card to my hard drives. I'm using a Coolermaster Storm Sniper case for reference.
Cons: None really. It is a $20.00 cable but if you compare prices for LSI and 3Ware RAID cards between the versions with a cable and versions without, the difference is usually at least $20.00, usually more.
Overall Review: It's red. I'd somewhat prefer black but the "official" one that was the same brand as my RAID card only comes in red, at least here on Newegg. Oh well, not a big deal.