Motherboards - Computer Peripherals

Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 - Case fan - 120 mm

You live and learn, 2010-07-15
I started building pcs a while ago. I've learnt that you can pay between 10 and 15 pounds for a 120mm case fan and it's not that great and sounds like a hovercraft.
Or you can pay between 10 and 15 pounds for a good one.
The Sharkoon Silent Eagle is one of the good ones (see also Noctua fans and Akasa Apaches)
I have a pc that used to sound like it was trying to take off. I replaced the LED fans with Sharkoons and now it is virtually silent and several degrees cooler.
The fan is well built and has a golf ball effect on the blades. This is supposed to increase the amount of air it shifts and seems to do what it claims.
I can't recommend this fan highly enough. Use them and you won't regret it. John Williams

IOMAX SATA Drive to IDE Converter (Connect SATA Drive to IDE/ATA Motherboard)

• Allows SATA storage device (Hard drive, DVD re-writer, etc) to be used on an IDE/ATA motherboard
• No drivers required
• Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 Specification
• Supports ATA 133/100/66
• Supports SATA I and SATA II

IDE To SATA converter, 2009-11-18
Required new hard drive, But my motherboard had no sata connecters so I needed a SATA converter to make it work. This kit came with everything that you need to install a SATA Drive to an IDE motherboard. The instructions are not clear as to what the jumper is for,I found i had to move it to make the converter work.Later I had my new 500Gb HardDrive up and running. It does exactly what it says, and good value for money.Only problem I found was that jumper.

ASUS AM3 M4A785TD-V EVO Motherboard Intel Socket 5200MT/S

• 140w CPU support
• 128MB SidePort Memory
• GPU NOS
• ASUS EPU
• Turbo Key

Great value, ExpressGate is wonderful, 2010-05-20
Positive: An hour after opening the box I had a new AMD-II quad core machine up and installing WinXP and Linux. This is my third AMD compatible ASUS motherboard and I would definitely upgrade to a fourth! The manual is up to the usual Asus standard and installing the various chipset drivers was a breeze. BIOS allows boot from external media (USB, eSATA). The onboard GPU is adequate for most (non-gamer) users, although I installed a 1GB DDR3 Crossfire graphics card. Express Gate is something new for me, but it is wonderful to be able to boot to a shell that runs an internet browser within a few seconds of pressing the ON button.
Negative: Could really do with a couple more connection blocks for the USB ports - just makes connections a bit quicker and easier. No FDD support - I still use one but could use a USB FD drive or memory stick instead. I miss the voice on my A8V-Deluxe!

Bi-Directional IDE / SATA Converter (Connect IDE Drive to SATA Motherboard or SATA Drive to IDE Motherboard)

• Allows SATA storage device to be used on an IDE motherboard or IDE storage device to be used on a SATA motherboard
• No drivers required
• Supports ATA 133/100/66 and ATAPI devices
• Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 Specification
• Supports SATA I and SATA II

exactly what it says on the tin, 2010-07-23
Was Connecting my old IDE or PATA hard drive to a new mother board with only 1 IDE connector. Bought this "bi-directional converter" and attached it to my hard drive to go into my SATA mothetboard via the SATA cable. Worked first time, no problems, booted windows xp. Would reccomend it to anyone. If it is connected to your main hard drive (the one you intend to boot from) you may still need to set the drive to master with the jumper.

50cm SATA internal Hard Drive Cable with Angled Connector

• Compatible with both the SATA I & SATA II specifications
• Data Transfer Speed upto 3Gbit/s
• Connector Type: 7pin S-ATA Male, with 1 side Angled
• Length: 0.5M

Great for cable mangement on SFF PCs, 2010-05-14
I have a small form factor PC and I have used 2 of these cables, one for the CD drive, and one for the Hard Drive. They are excellent because they make it easier to cable manage by tucking behind the motherboard backplate. I now have an exellent airflow through my PC and CPU and GPU temperatures have lowered by as much as 2 degrees with all of my cable management.

ASUS 775 P5KPL-AM EPU Motherboard Intel Socket M-ATX 1333FSB

• EPU
• Turbo Key
• FSB1600 (O.C)
• 5000hrs VRM solid capacitors
• -

Asus 775 P5KPL-AM EPU Motherboard, 2010-06-29
This motherboard is ideal for a middle of the road pc. I have now build two computers using this motherboard and have had no problems. For the money it is great value. There is the over clocking facility, which I haven't had to use but good to know it's there. Altogether, a great motherboard.

Gigabyte GA-M720-US3 Motherboard Phenom FX Socket AM2+ nForce 720D ATX RAID Gigabit Ethernet LAN

• Ultra Durable 3 Technology with copper cooled qu
• Revolution energy saving design with Easy Energy
• Supports AMD Phenom / Athlon series processors
• Solid capacitors design for CPU VRM
• Dual channel DDR2 1200+ for remarkable system pe

Excellent budget board, 2010-04-03
Needed a board which also had more tha two PCI slots and this fitted the bill. Have always had good reliability from Gigabyte so I opted for this as it was a good budget price and its performance has been so good with my old processor that I am going to use the board with a new phenom chip.
Would certainly recommend this board.

Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Motherboard

• Leading quality standard of Ultra Durable 3 tech
• Innovative Smart 6 technology for Smarter PC man
• Support Intel Core i7/ Core i5 processors with L
• Dynamic Energy Saver 2 technology enables best e
• Support ATI CrossFireX for ultimate graphics per

Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Motherboard Intel Core 2 Extreme Socket 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Gigabit Ethernet

• Revolution energy saving design with Easy Energy
• Supports Intel Core 2 multi-core and upcoming 45
• Solid capacitors and Ferrite core choke design i
• Dual Channel DDR2 800 for outstanding system per
• Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100

Budget motherboards have come a long way, 2010-03-29
After purchasing a budget graphics card capable of hardware decoding 1080p content with H.264 encoding so my system can function as a rudimentary media centre in addition to daily tasks, I found that my existing Abit SG-95 board would cook anything placed in the PCI-E slot. I assumed my previous card had died, seeing as most graphics units I've owned don't last long, but it was in fact the SG-95 overclocking the GPU uncontrollably which was causing system hangs, so only the onboard graphics would work and shared resources were degrading system performance noticably.

Not willing to spend too much, as I've had the other componants in the PC for over three years (3gHz/800mHz FSB Pentium D Presler, 2x1GB DD2-667 RAM, Maxtor 250GB SATA Harddrive and a load of other generic componants) and eventually want to build a new liquid-cooled system with a noise-reducing case, this seemed like a good option. I'm pleased to say it is!

The board is pretty basic but quite well-constructed. The superior FSB speed (1333mHz vs. 800mHz) and better RAM support (max 4GB DDR2-800 vs. 2GB DDR2-667) allows for inexpensive future upgrades. The default sound apparently allows for 7.1 output even though it has less 3.5mm jack outputs than my old one; basic stereo fidelity is respectable anyway, better signal-to-noise ratio than expected (I'm used to noisy onboard sound drivers thanks to crosstalk from nearby onchip componants). I didn't test the onboard graphics but from the specs given the performance would be adequate for desktop applications and would probably allow basic low resolution abilities for games not using complex shading routines. Unlike some cheaper models the PCB isn't brittle, and bends a little which makes installation a lot easier. The Amazon specs state that the ethernet driver is Realtek, but on my model it is actually an Atheros, a brand I was not familiar with. Regardless, ethernet performance has been flawless, so if this was a cost-cutting measure it has paid off.

After an easy installation, performance even with the same parts I used before was improved. Intel chipsets might be a tad inferior to nVidia ones as was noted in another review, but to be fair if you're building a bleeding edge machine with top-of-the-line gaming/video rendering capabilities you're not going to buy this anyway. The BIOS allows for overclocking of the Presler processor, something I may test in the future as I do a lot of high-quality video encoding with MeGUI, but it requires a careful hand; if you increase all the values on the relevant page apparently it will run at ~10gHz, though I doubt this recorded value takes throttling/RAM limitations into account and even if it did, trying to triple the clock speed is a sure way to burn the CPU to death pretty quickly even with extreme cooling (a boost of around 30% instead of 300% is a more reasonable goal). Rather prudently there is a DualBIOS feature which will restore your old settings, or failsafe ones, in the event that the values you set don't allow the system to boot. I'm impressed such a feature exists on a budget model, and it has already been useful.

There are a few drawbacks, which are to be expected in this price range. The lack of PCI slots could be a problem for some; personally a Creative soundcard and Belkin wireless unit are all I need besides a graphics card so it's not an issue for me. Having only 1 IDE connector (probably best used for DVD-R drives) forced me to purchase some converters for my old PATA hard drives, which have worked flawlessly: not all motherboards allow SATA to IDE conversion but this one does. Due to the way the motherboard assigns resources, everything shows up in the BIOS as master/slave IDE but reset assured, standard SATA performance is possible with true SATA devices. The FDD controller is mounted under the second PCI slot, which is strange and may require some users to purchase a longer cable should they require this legacy feature. As floppy drives are obsolete at this point (I only have one in my machine because the front of the PC doesn't look right without it) this should be pretty minor. Something which concerns me is the disparity in the +/- 12v supplies; SpeedFan reports averages of +2.5v and -16.97v but the system has been stable since the upgrade with the only blue screen coming from a graphics card driver problem, a user error rather than hardware failure, so I'm assuming the program is misreading the values and that the voltages are nominal.

To summarise, this product has surpassed my expectations and proved itself a worthy upgrade, with many benefits and only small problems, most of which are easy and inexpensive to solve. For the amount I spent I really don't feel I could have done better.

ASUS 775 P5QPL-AM Motherboard Intel Socket S/V/L M-ATX 1333FSB

• Intel G41 + ICH7 chipset
• FSB 1333/1066/800 MHz
• ASUS Turbo Key
• V-core Solid Capacitors
• DX10 Support

Excellent budget motherboard, 2010-05-26
Very good motherboard for the price, the built in graphics card runs windows 7 ultimate Aero with no problems at all. I put a dual core cpu, 2 gig of ram, and a 500gb hard drive in and now its a top quality media center. 5 star buy.