Pros: supports 4GB of ram. nics support trunking. clean layout. attractive design. rock-solid performance.

Cons: loud powersupply fan. bright blue light. cables are tight inside.

Other Thoughts: paired with xeon e3110 and dual raptors. (soft)raid1 thru ubuntu 8.04 64-bit. running zimbra6 64-bit as personal collab server. would like to see two more sata ports and mounting for 2.5" hdds.

Pros: Solid, quiet

Cons: No hardware RAID built in - have to use Windows software mirroring or find a RAID PCI card.

Other Thoughts: Does support 4GB RAM using 2GB DIMMs despite specs saying otherwise. W2K3/W2K8 OS report only 3.36GB usable. Nice to have the extra RAM. Running two servers with 3085 Xeon dual-core with no trouble.

Pros: Extremely quiet, well laid out.

Cons: PCI Express slot works with graphics cards ONLY. Why would they put a PCI-E slot in a server that doesn't support anything but video cards is beyond me.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

The RS100-X5 server board does support other devices built upon PCIe standard. If you are having issues installing a PCIe device, please contact our tech support at 1-812-282-2787 for assistance in resolving your issues.

Best Regards,

Pros: Cheap
Quiet after boot
Room for dual internal 3.5" hard drives
Stable
USB CD-ROM/DVD-ROM works great (bootable)

Cons: Only 2 gig of RAM is a huge weakness
No CD-ROM is included no matter what the photos show you

Other Thoughts: We needed a rack mounted server quick for an installation at a customers site. Since this was a beta site, we were paying out of pocket for the rack server, and my bosses were bristling at the $1300+ that a bare bones Dell or HP, but we managed to put together a great server for like $700. For some reason time never seems to factor into bosses dollar equations. Anyway... I really do like the server. 2 Gigs of RAM is very low for a server these days, so support for at least 4 would be nice. I bought a 2.53 Dual Core processor, and the BIOS flashes a warning every time we boot it's not an officially supported processor. However Windows seems to correctly identify it and the speed is where it should be. The machine is stable as well. I did have to dig through the BIOS to figure out where to turn off the "freeze on warning" item in there, since the machine would always halt on this warning during boot.

Very quiet, stable, room for the dual HDD. Great. Thanks.

Pros: Easy to put together, very quiet running overall pretty fast with a 2.53 Core 2 duo.

Cons: No north bridge cooling fan. Its to hot to touch!!!!
Power cables are too short. Had to cut the zip ties to reach.
No large 4 pin molex. (for a fan) SATA and floppy only.
Does not come with pictured DVD-ROM.
Does not come with pictured rails.
2 GIGs of RAM MAX

Other Thoughts: Not bad for the price but I would expect better design from ASUS. BUY a north bridge fan and be ready to figure out a way to use the floppy power cable to power it.

Pros: These things are cheap and run great. We picked up 2 of them to run as a firewall and NAS. They are SUPER quiet!! We have the rack right in the office and you don't even notice that they are running. Using them with a Celeron 430 (#N82E16819116039) and 2GB OCZ ram (#N82E16820227078). The NAS is using 2 WD drives (#N82E16822136151) with linux soft raid and a Addonics CF-to-PATA adapter.

Cons: Originally purchased to run m0n0wall or pfSense. Unfortunately, the network chipset (marvell yukon) is not supported in earlier versions of freebsd, so could not get the controllers to recognize. Instead of hacking around the applications, decided to go with linux-based solution instead which works out-of-the-box.
Does not include the slim cd drive. You can purchase these separate for each machine, or just get a USB DVD drive, which it will boot off great.
The units seems a little heavy for the rack ears, so we supported the backs of them as well.

Other Thoughts: Instead of springing for slim dvd drives, we just got a LG USB dvd drive (#N82E16827136146) and it boots off this great!
There is only space to mount 2 3.5" SATA drives inside, and only just enough cable slack to get to these drives. There is also 1 standard IDE port, which worked great for our Addonics CF adapter. We mounted the adapter in the PCI slot, but had to extend the 1 floppy power cable to reach the rear.
We will probably order a few more of these before they are discontinued.

Pros: Solid ASUS design, unusual but very effective CPU cooler, unusual but extremely well designed- clean layout, cool operation, very small server board, somewhere in between an mATX and miniITX, leaving more place for other stuff. Silent Fan operation. (Set 'smart fan' in BIOS)
Quick boot, and smooth installation of a wide variety of Server OS, including legacy W2K Advanced Server and Fedora. No driver problems.

Cons: Comes without CD, given the low price that's acceptable, but what is NOT acceptable is that there is also no hardware included (mini IDE adapter, and small mounting screws) to mount a slim CD/DVD in the chassis. One has to spend hrs- if not days to locate this special hardware. That is the reason I give this server only 4 stars, otherwise this little gem deserves a 5 star rating.

Other Thoughts: Given the low price and small size of the RS100 barebone server, it offers amazing value for your money, it is powerfull enough to serve as medium duty mail server, ftp server, web server, DNS server, and light duty Database server.
In a nutshell: for your 300++ $ you get a professional mini server on a shoestring.

Pros: Great small form factor. Ultra Quiet (I Mean nearly Silent). Easy to build. With no modification of the bios settings, recognized external USB DVD Drive on first try. Cheap.

Cons: The SATA cables provided are a bit short. No Rails as shown in images here on NewEgg.

One of the servers came in the original box, but seems NewEgg put the other in just a random box they had lying around with no other protection. The server was hence dented when it arrived.

Other Thoughts: I bought two of these to use in a production trailer for my production company. One is running highly graphic intensive weather software on top of Windows Vista; The other is running Red Hat to provide network services. Both systems are operating very well, AND FAST, with only a Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8GHz 512KB L2 Cache Processor and 2 GB of Ram.

Pros: small... dead quiet (after boot).. cheap. worked with no issues.

Cons: the blue LED is bright enough to light a city. 2 gig of ram max :(

Other Thoughts: im running this with 2 gig.. a xeon 3065 and a 32mb cache hd.. installed in minutes. this thing is super quiet... If you need it.. its quiet and fast and works.

Pros: 1U, supports core 2 duo, price, newegg's service

Cons: item's description gives you false hope making you think it comes with a DVD drive, doesn't come with a cable for a regular Slim optical drive, short power cable for optical drive

Other Thoughts: I had a spare optical drive from when I replaced my notebook's drive with a DVD burner but this server only has IDE/Sata ports so I had to buy a standard to slim atapi adapter which was $10, unfortunately newegg doesn't carry it so I had to purchase it elsewhere. I purchased this server to recycle my E6400 cpu I upgraded recently in my PC. It is running XP x64 which is based off of server 2003. I was disappointed I had to buy the IDE adapter and re-use my old optical drive instead of having one included, but luckily I had a spare 5" IDE cable laying around. I did have to extend one wire on the power supply in order to get the power to reach the optical drive but that was painless. I am extremely happy with my purchase even though it shows it comes with a dvd drive but doesn't actually have one. Even with the extra work I had to do to install, because of the price I still have to give this barebone 5 eggs.

*E6400 C2D
*2GB(2x1GB) Corsair VS 533
*Samsung F1 750gb HD