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Reviews (3)
23 May 2016
Great case with a lot of potential!
This is a wonderfully designed case even though it's a little over priced. The style and layout are hard to beat and definitely worthy to be an upgrade to my aging Chili Pro 1/4 (circa 2000) with room to grow!
A lot of people take note of the 3 fans on the right hand side and how they direct air over the harddrives and other in-particulars. Not to mention the 2 exhaust fans behind the harddrive cage giving a total of 5 (FIVE) fans pulling air through on the backside. Keep in mind, the 2 exhaust fans can be removed and mounted on the top of the case on the 'motherboard' side to give you 3x3 (left side/ right side.) I believe they did this to encourage water cooling of the CPU and video cards.
As for the tempered glass all around, it looks wonderful! Keep in mind, it's a good idea to grease the retaining screws holding the glass in. They are aluminum and will jam very easily otherwise and risk being broken off when you attempt to remove them. I ran into that 1 issue and they had to overnighted replacement case screws.
06 July 2016
Runs Like a Top!
Despite all the claims that PCIe 1x speeds would be slower, as a test I copied movies over from a USB 3.0 thumbdrive, via the 19pin cable, to a USB 3.0 external harddrive connected to the pack of the card, and it ran pretty consistently at 80Mbs! I did it again, backing up some more moves (about 1.5Gb ea) and the same! Can't beat that with a stick!
03 July 2016
One Buggy and Underpowered Board
This is one nightmare of a board... for starters, you have to upgrade the BIOS in order to be able to detect a second stick of DDR2 ram, don't know if this applies to DDR3 though. Another thing, it had POST issues with certain CPU's and has to be restarted several times before it detects the CPU.
Another issue with this board is, it's a low power 95w CPU board. Which translates into having issues with a limited number of CPU's and GPU's. For the life of me, I couldn't get anything faster than an ATI HD3000 series or Nvidia GT 6xx series card to work, it just simply lacks the power to initialize the card and that's with an 800W PSU! I tried with ATI HD6770, HD5670, and HD4750, didn't have the power to fire ANY of up. Same applies to Nvidia.
The one thing that I've learned from the 2 lower power 95w motherboards that I've purchased over the years is this, it's not work the $$ when you can purchase a full power 125W board for the same prices minus all the upgrade limitations! Would I buy another low power motherboard, hell NO! This board was a replacement for an ancient Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 and had all the same issues plus a few extra!
Pros:
Lower power
Good for websurfing
Cons:
Lack of CPU and GPU upgrade options
Limited to low speed usage and costs just the same as a higher power motherboard