Joined on 04/22/09
As advertised: Quality Product
Pros: - Great Budget PC - Excellent CPU - Quiet System - Some Upgrade Potential - Nice Warranty for Refurbished
Cons: - Slim tower narrows upgrade options
Overall Review: The shipping was fast on this and for upgrading an old Vista tower and another old Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 this turned into an excellent purchase. They worked right out of the box with little work to get it going aside from the usual Windows 10 setup. I would have liked the tower to be bigger to help with adding a better PSU for a decent GPU addition to allow it to handle some gaming better, but for a simple desktop for general purposes and watching movies or videos it has been great. Would definitely recommend it for anyone with a super low budget needing to get a 'new' tower that has at least a year of coverage to keep you feeling good about your inexpensive purchase.
Love/Hate Relationship
Pros: Performed well above my expectations for the price. I was cautious about the limited RAM (only 1GB when many seem to be going to 2GB and it's only DDR3) but the cuda cores and increased clock speed compared to my old GT 230 were amazing. It's also very quiet since it runs very cool >40 C and even under heavy load seems to only top at about mid 50s and the very rare 60 on an extremely hot day.
Cons: I really only have one con, but it's getting to be quite an annoying one. Occasionally, and it's often after I've been playing some more graphical heavy games, my screen locks up in a green acid trip like the drivers are crashing or something and I'm forced to hard restart. After that, things are fine. I can't fully predict when it does since it's happened right after restarts loading up my web browsers and then other times I can run dozens of different graphic intensive programs without restarts for days and never have a single issue. The card still performs well, but the unexpected locking up does make for some frustrating days.
Overall Review: I was needing something to replace my dying GT 230 and was on an extreme budget that could use a standard PSU of 300w. Found this card and it came really fast and I was back in business. Aside from my single con about this card which could be on my end (though I never had this issue previously), I would recommend this to anyone who needs a low budget, low end (but great for the price) card for gaming or just simply a nice quiet card that runs cool.