lionelhutz

This motherboard is working good for me. Booted right up no problems at all. Peter

I used the 590 and installed a black faced Istar 4in3 raid cage. It worked well and even looks good. I'll eventually add 2 more and end up with 12 drives in the case. I like the case. It's a good looking case and pretty easy to use. I just slid the Istar in from the front and clicked 2 of the quick holders into it from the side. I have not removed the right case side yet. I'd guess that the case sides are ligher than the Lian Li because the premium cases always have heavy sides. The sides are also a little trickier to get onto the case, but really not much. I have another case and it has a "hook" at the bottom that drops over the case then I just close it up and slide it forward. I have to hold the side over the opening and wiggle it around a little to get it on the 590. The build of the main chassis though seems good. I've seen cheap cases that are held square only with the sides on and that isn't the case with this one. I also put the power supply in upside down. I think you can get 3 of the 4 screws in doing that. Seems like a common mod, if you can call it that. The only mod I did was change the fan on the Istar. It was too noisy for my liking so I put a 80mm onto the outside of it instead of the 80mm that was mounted inside the back cover. I've seen the drives get up to about 38C but the fan I installed really isn't that powerful. It was a low speed one I had lying around. I might change it again when I get the next cage. Honestly, I'd have a hard time justifying the $180 for the Lian Li when the 590 is $70. Peter

I set up a new server using this board. The rest of the system is as follows OCZ PC2-6400 2GB BE-2350 processor Coolermaster Centurion 590 Case (this case is cheap and has 9 5.25" bays) 4 in 3 raid or stacker drive cage 2 x 500 GB hard drives Old power supply I had lying around This system has worked perfectly from the first time it was powered on. Right now, I'm running 100Mbps network in the house. I tried transferring a 2gig file. From the server to this computer windows is reporting ~85% network utilization and from this computer to the server I get ~75% network utilization. I like seeing these speeds but does XP report network utilization fairly accurately in the task manager?? At any rate, I expect that adding more drives will likely slow this thing down. Peter