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It's worth talking about what general usage of the UltraStation was like. I tried to use it as much as possible as my main system for as long as I could. I didn't install my coding tools, but I tried to do everything else from it, just to see if it was like using my own tweaked setup.
Performance wise, I couldn't really fault the Time in general use. From the benchmarks, you can see it was fine.
I was tempted to run HDTach benchmarks against the WD2500JB, but without a similar specification disk to compare against, a graph in isolation is fairly meaningless. It performed as expected, with a near 60MB/sec STR figure across the entire disk, on the nForce2 IDE controller.
They also didn't do anything silly to Windows XP, leaving it just how it should be. I'd have liked to see some extra setup with regards to the built-in firewall, which was disabled. Given the Blaster worm recently, it's prudent to switch that stuff on from the factory and first install. But apart from that, everything worked fine. How boring!
Using the Pinnacle software was fine, I'm now looking for a DVD-R for my own box, having sampled 4.7GB of removable goodness for the first time. Cheers for that Time, more expense I can't afford just yet.
The one thing I will complain about a little is the wireless keyboard and mouse. I'm a keyboard snob, you'd have to prise my Apple Pro USB from my cold dead hands, before giving me something else to use. But the keyboard on the Time was fine, if maybe angled a little too shallow for my liking. But I digress, the key action suited my girly digits, all the extra buttons did what their little emblems suggested, and the ACPI sleep function worked excellently from the keyboard.
But the mouse, argh. If there's one thing I wanted to do, it was destroy that bastard rodent with extreme force. Initially I thought the batteries were just a little low. Movement was initially very sluggish, even with close aquaintance with the little radio receiver that feeds the signal to the PC. So I swapped them out for some high capacity batteries that my digital camera usually feasts on. But that horrible sluggish feeling persisted, I just couldn't get rid of it.
When you are used to precision mousing, moving a mouse, wireless or not, and literally having it react around a second later, is just the biggest usage pain in the arse I could have had. Maybe it was just a poor review sample, but what can I do, other than report on the hardware sent? I'm praying that buyers don't experience the same thing, computer rage is bad for you.
I don't mean to rant, but that was really all that was wrong with the system usage wise. And I was expecting one of those horror stories you hear about. Praise for Time, something I'm sure some of you weren't expecting to hear.
Noise wise, it was truly about as silent as it comes. Use of the reference NVIDIA FX5900 means that it turns its fan off when in 2D mode. And with it being the noisiest component in the whole system, things went eerily quiet at some points. Those were the points when I wasn't causing public disturbance with the ZXR-500's, the best PC speakers I've ever had the pleasure of abusing.
Lastly, with only 2 USB ports on the back of the PC, and a lone port on the front, more system based ports would have been desirable. Losing a port to hook up the less than accessible ports on the monitor is less than optimal. The MSI board definitely supports more, they should definitely be shipped by that token.
So what about a conclusion? I'll have a go.
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