Joined on 08/07/06
Surprisingly Good
Pros: Looks great in my Coolermaster Stacker case, nice display, comes with just about everything you need in one package, and the price is way cheaper at newegg than anywhere else. Three fan settings, blue back-lit display matches the blue lights I have elsewhere in my case, quick disconnect fittings are convenient, and the ability to continue to cool the computer for a set time after shutdown is a great bonus. All in all I have been pleasantly surprised with the capabilities of this product. Add a 120mm radiator to this set up and it will surpass almost all your cooling needs.
Cons: The reservoir fill port is a pain to get to when installed. The quick disconnects allow the Aquagate to be removed from the case for filling without loosing liquid, but when you connect and disconnect them few dribbles come out. I made my hoses long enough that I don’t have to disconnect them to slide the Aquagate out for refilling. The hoses and fittings are all ¼ inch ID. I would like larger hoses but they work. The unit does “freak out” if the temperature probe isn’t connected. I broke the tip of the probe when installing it so the Aquagate would shut down my computer when on for about 30 seconds, it’s a safety mechanism, but it’s annoying when trying to figure out why it’s beeping. Coolermaster gave me the run around on replacing the thermal probe, so I finally gave up on them and took an on-board probe off of an old motherboard I had and soldered it in place of the broken temp probe. Be careful the probe doesn’t get between the water block and the CPU or it will get crushed.
Overall Review: I was concerned with using such a small radiator for all cooling so I placed a Thermaltake CL-W0002 12cm radiator in the cooling loop. With this set up I OCed my Pentium D 840 from 3.2Ghz to 3.8Ghz and kept my temps at 32° C idle, 39-42° C full load, and around 36°C after a few hours of Quake 4 on Ultra settings. All with the Aquagate and Thermaltake fan on lowest settings. There’s plenty of cooling available for a more extreme OC but I’m saving the extra heat dissipating capacity to water cool my SLI 7900GTs. I used Arctic Silver on the block, but it comes with thermal grease. You loose a PCI slot with this kit, it might cause a problem for some. If using a 775 processor you have to take the motherboard out to put the backing plate on. The Aquagate fan on its highest setting sounds like it’s about to take flight, but lowest fan speed is plenty. There is just enough fluid provided with the kit to fill a setup like mine. Thanks to a little help from Thermaltake this system get’s an A+.
NO SOUND
Pros: Cheap, PCI-E 16X, Small
Cons: As one other review of this board posted; THE ONBOARD AUDIO DOES NOT WORK. I used an old SoundBlaster board and got sound that way, but that takes up one of the few PCI slots available. Also there's only support for single channel memory. Just being nit-picky but the memory DIMM and the PCI-E slot are really close together, it’s hard to change out memory with a video card installed. One other problem I had was stability issues when using various USB devices. I updated the latest USB 2.0 drivers from Biostar’s website and things got better but didn’t cure the ailment.
Overall Review: I’m sure I could have eventually solved the issues with the USB but not having sound bugged me. I had a wireless card in one of the 2 PCI slots and had to use a sound card in the remaining PCI card so they were all full, no future expandability. Personally I’m not much of a fan of any of the VIA chipsets. I’ve RMAed the board and since purchased a slightly more expensive board made by ECS with an Intel chipset which has functional onboard audio. Seems from looking at the reviews working audio is hit and miss, just keep that in mind when buying this board.
Disapointingly Slow Write Speeds
Pros: 1 Tb that comfortably fits in your pocket for $60, hard to be mad about that. I recall spending $80 for a 1 Gb USB thumb drive when I started grad school years ago.
Cons: I'm getting <20 Mb/s transfer (write) speeds real world Windows 10 over USB C. I expected more. I'm using a 4 year old XPS 15 9510's 10 Gbps USB C port, maybe I need a different cable?
Overall Review: It's a decent amount of storage, it's small and portable, just don't be in a hurry to save anything large to it.
Not for RAID
Pros: All the specs.
Cons: Have/Had 4 of these in RAID 10 for a little over a year. I Lost one in a little less than a year. I waited on the Egg to have them in stock again as long as I could. I bought a replacement from another vendor. Replaced the failed drive with new one. RAID array was 46% done rebuilding when I lost another one. In short these drives don't seem to like a workstation environment.
Overall Review: I should have bought WD RE3 or Seagate ES.2 drives instead. I've read that WDTLER utility works on these drives, so I might try it and see if it's possibly the drives timing out causing them to fail. Kind of strange though, I got almost a full year trouble free, then within a months time they started dying off. I lost a WD Green in another PC that was a single drive. It was less than 6 months old, and it's discontinued now. I guess that ought to tell me something. I've been a long time WD fan, but I'm starting to question my "faith."
Adequate
Pros: Bought it on sale for $60 shipped. It showed up with in 3 days. The head unit has good sound, ok power, aux input on the front via 3.5mm plug. It's a good name brand.
Cons: Hard to read at night, no built in MP3/WMA play back, no remote. But that's being pretty nit picky for what it is.
Overall Review: I needed a cheap replacement for a high end Alpine before selling the car it was in. This fit the bill, for what I needed. When I bought this, it was almost $45 cheaper here at Newegg than the local car audio shop. This was the cheapest head unit the local shop had too. I wanted a cheap but name brand head unit to sell with the car. Car sold, I'm happy. Thanks Newegg.
Great Deal
Pros: For the price, I can't knock any eggs off. compact, decent sized screen, great zoom for such a compact camera, 8Mp, adequate settings for the novice. Great gift. Free Lowpro camera case.
Cons: The only major con would be packaging, camera was in a single layer of bubble wrap, and tossed loose into the Olympus box, along with the accessories. I was concerned when I opened the box from Newegg, and everything in the Olympus box was rattling around. If I was to get nit-picky: Olympus' proprietary accessories, such as xD cards instead of SD, Newegg had a good price but slim selection, and shipping is ridiculous for something as small as an xD card. You can't use just any ole mini usb cable, you've got to use the Olympus cable, with the proprietary end.
Overall Review: This was bought as a birthday gift for my college age sister, so she can use it to document her summer internship, and all of the weddings she'll be in/at this summer. She loves it, and it's light years beyond the '02 model Sony Cyber Shot it replaced. For around Seventy bucks for a quality camera, xD card, camera bag, and shipping, you really can't beat it.