Pros: Simply fantastic cooling. At idle, the temperature was 24C (76F), the same as the ambient temperature. During testing for 30 minutes (see setup below) temperature was at most 35C (95F), with an average of 34C (93F). A second test done at an ambient temperature of 16C (61F) resulted in an average full load temp of 23C (73F). Installation was easy and everything fit properly. The copper polishing and chrome is done very well with no apparent flaws. I would highly recommend this cooler.

Cons: It is large. I used a full-sized ATX case (Thermaltake Armor). You'd need to have at least 6" of clear case depth inside to fit the cooler and fans. 5" without the fans. The cooler itself was about an inch shorter than the width of the motherboard when installed. Installing both fans could be significantly wider than the motherboard. I say "could" because the fans are on a rail that gives about 2.5" of lateral adjustability.

Overall Review: Cooler is mounted on a Intel E6850 using Arctic Silver 5. Motherboard is an Asus P5E WS Pro. Cooler has two Thermaltake A2018 120mm fans mounted to it, both dialed down to 1,500 RPM (fastest speed without noticeable sound increase) and blowing into the cooler. Testing was done with two instances of CPU Burn-In (v1.01), setting the affinity to separate cores. Ambient temperature was 24C (76F)

Pros: Included software is very flexible and has a lot of features. You can set up network storage, backups and also span across multiple drives without having to create RAID sets and it will overwrite the oldest recordings when it's full. Multiple users can be set up and they can be limited to specific cameras. Video source can be directly attached, a feed from another DVR, or an IP camera. Descriptions, motion sensitivity, recording schedules, framerates can all be configured on a camera by camera basis. In addition to the web client, there's also a client for Windows Mobile devices that works very well if you have a cellphone with a decent size screen. Included Matrix software allows you to pull video from multiple DVR's to a single location (like a command center) for viewing and can be configured for multiple monitors. The latest software revision allows for much higher resolutions and widescreen displays. We have ours connected to a 28" LCD panel running at 1920 x 1200

Cons: Physically connected cameras can not be rearranged in software. You have to change the connections to rearrange them on the screen. You cannot "pick and choose" what cameras to display. That is, if you have 32 cameras set to record, you cannot view #1, 11, 21, and 32 in a quad split screen (or any of the predefined layouts.) You can do it with the Matrix software, but there's no playback functionality....it's live view only. Will not run in a 64bit OS (not sure if that's really a con though.) Converting video from native format to MPEG can be a bit slow. Software upgrades require an uninstall and reinstall of the application.

Overall Review: We have 3 DVRs, each with 2 of these cards and 4-6TB of storage each. With all of our cameras (32 color on each) set to 15-30 fps at 64x480 on "Smart Recording" we get about a week of recording per TB (approximately 4.5GB per camera per day). Consider slightly oversizing the power supply. Our first builds were buggy with 550W PS. We changed to 650W and they have been rock-solid stable. With the exception of one extended power outage, two of these systems have been running non-stop for over a year. The third was just put into service but I don't expect any change in the stability. Our systems are built with ASUS and GigaByte X38 motherboards, have 4GB RAM and Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad processors. The hard drives in our latest system have been formatted with 64kb blocks. Theoretically this should improve read and write times.

Pros: Media was labeled at 4x and performed at theat speed with no issues. Price was downright cheap compared to other media. Only about a $1 more than 2x media from same manufacturer

Cons: Hrmm.....could have more space on the disc surface to write on.

Overall Review: Not much to say other than the media worked perfectly in my LG drive!