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Benjamin W.

Benjamin W.

Joined on 08/27/06

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 12
Most Favorable Review

Silent Class

LIAN LI Black Aluminum PC-C37B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case
LIAN LI Black Aluminum PC-C37B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

Pros: Case is sleek looking! Will look good in any room with any interior or style. Very quite and keeps things cool. Well placed vents below hard drive, for full size PSU, and above CPU.

Cons: Power diode on front of case is like a blue fog light cutting through a dark night at sea! Awful bright and annoying in a dark room. I removed the diode and painted it black as well as the back of the plastic the light travels through to the case front. Now it is a dim blue!

Overall Review: Make sure to use a modular power supply to minimize cable clutter. Anyone buying this will know it is a smaller case, so choose components accordingly! Stock heatsinks fit well, be careful if you are going aftermarket. Expansions are low profile. I had to modify my wireless cards bracket with the dremel and bend it with a hammer and anvil to create a low profile. Results were flawless, but be aware if you are planning on using hardware you already have.

Most Critical Review

DOA

Foxconn BloodRage LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
Foxconn BloodRage LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: The board looks great, and should be everything I'm looking for.

Cons: It doesn't even post.

Overall Review: I know my cpu, psu, and other components are good, they've worked in another setup. Unless Mushkin sent me 3 bad redline sticks, this motherboard is junk. Now I get fisted for shipping this piece back to the Egg, none to happy right now.

Perfect!

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 06G-P4-4998-KR 6GB CLASSIFIED GAMING w/ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling w/ Free Installed Backplate Graphics Card
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 06G-P4-4998-KR 6GB CLASSIFIED GAMING w/ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling w/ Free Installed Backplate Graphics Card

Pros: Replaced a somewhat aged HD 7970 in what is going to be a complete PC overhaul. Actually ordered two of these. One for my wife and one for me! Both are going in the mainframe/gaming PC. Had just purchased a 4K monitor, and the difference in GTA V, Witcher 3, FF14, and any other game I try is night and day! This is with just one card as mine is yet to show up after a week. I set it all to Ultra and while it may not be 60fps, I can't tell. I always used AMD, because who doesn't love and underdog? I had one Nvidia card in the past, but it was a midrange replacement for a short time and I wasn't really impressed with it at the time. I felt AMD offered comparable performance at a much better price, but having a top of the line Nvidia card is a different experience all together! Faster, better software, better drivers, less power use and I know from selling prices of used hardware that the green teams cards are like a fine sports cars that retain their value over time, where as the red team's cards are like a Kia, and aren't worth the value of a soda can once you drive them off the lot! I've been converted!

Cons: I had to take an egg off for having to pay $10 for the worst shipping ever created by man. The video card gets 5 egg though. The egg used to use budget shipping that was free and always fast. I remember using this free or budget shipping and getting my stuff in 3 days or less, this FedEx smartpost is the worst! Both cards get cross country in three days, and arrive in CT. Hers moves on to MA and is here in two more days. Mine sits in CT for over two days, and then again in MA after hers is already here! What's even worse is they change the deliver by date after it sits within an hour of me for four days from 7/11 to 7/13!!! WTH??? I even called both postal hubs to inquire and offered to go pick it up. Both times I'm told, we'll look into and call you back. Did they? Of course not! Last time the guy tells me, while your package is here we don't know if it has left yet or not, and once it's on a pallet and in a container we can't find it!!! Really??? Newegg loses an egg and the customer loses what used to be reliable fast budget shipping with this bogus shipping setup. Get rid of FedEx Smartpost please! I wish to hell I had paid for real shipping and dumped the eggsaver garbage!

Overall Review: Once I have both cards I will be very happy! planning on updating old Foxconn Bloodrage with i7 970 hexacore cpu and 12Gb of memory with new Skylake i7 6700K and z170 motherboard in August to go with these cards. I'll have to see how windows 10 works with cpu's before I decide though. It might be better to have more cores and if so maybe a Broadwell or even AMD cpu. Will have to wait and see. I haven't upgraded in 5 intel generations so whatever I do should make a difference. This is all in a Caselabs TH10 case with watercooling. No waterblock for the video cards yet?

Review revisited

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 21197-00-40G
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 21197-00-40G

Pros: This card was a beast to begin with.

Cons: There were underlying issues from the start. I took these with a grain of salt due to the newness of the technology. I had attributed it to drivers, but I know that to be false now that the card has bricked on me. In games I was getting random hard-locks. I eventually used OCCT gpu to test and within a minute and a half was getting errors in the hundreds of thousands!!! I was strongly considering an RMA at this point but thought maybe OCCT didn't support the card correctly yet. Wish I had went with my gut at that point as I would have had my replacement by now. Instead I let it slide, and continued to play games with frequent saves. Last night the card died! My pc shut down, and after troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the HD 7970. Fortunately, I have 2 other computers in the house I was able to pull parts from. Add another video card and bam, pc started!

Overall Review: What a drag!!! Pay to ship to california. Wait for rma process. No gaming pc for at least a couple weeks. Hope there is one in stock for replacement............sigh.

Has its perks!

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 21197-00-40G
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 21197-00-40G

Pros: Upgraded from an HD 5970 for my eyefinity gaming rig. Playing skyrim at 5760x1200 was alright with the old card, but this one handles it much better! Sapphire TriXX allows for decent overclocks 1200MHz/1810Mhz is where I quit overclocking and just decided to get some playing in! There is bound to be more headroom once I put some more time in, but I would rather play! Using all the eye candy and getting solid 60+ fps outdoors and 30+ fps in towns. This is better than the HD 5970 and the smoothness of play is a real delight! No more micro-stutter!

Cons: It doesn't come with a free water block? Honestly, this card is expensive and if your using any off the last generation Radeon cards like 6970 or 6950 in crossfire or the Nvidia equal 570 sli or even a single 580 it may not be worth the upgrade. I could have stuck with my 5970 and been happy.

Overall Review: Fortunately, I got over 50% return on the sale of my old card, got 2gb extra vram, and better power on a single gpu. The power savings with this card over the next couple years should help offset some of the remaining costs, and I can always add a second card if this one starts to struggle with any games in the future. Not likely with all the console ports though!

Bought the day it came out

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5970 (Hemlock) 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 100280SR
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5970 (Hemlock) 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 CrossFireX Support Video Card 100280SR

Pros: Where to begin? I have owned this card for almost a year now and it has been the best! This thing chews through everything on a single 24" monitor, and has been quite successful doing the same on the 3 24" in eyefinity on which I run it. Gaming and productivity bliss.

Cons: The price went through the roof after I got my card, so others had to pay more. Thankfully the price has come back to where it was when first released. My original card had a defective hdmi connector so I had to wait until stock was back up to use my eyefinity, otherwise I would have been out a card, and gotten my money back. Sapphire RMA not an issue. Replacement worked perfect.

Overall Review: Don't spend more on "faster" card scams, this sapphire card is better than the rest. Have read articles about most of the quote unquote non-reference models, and "overclocked" versions with no headroom to go further. They can't hit the 975mhz core 1250mhz memory like my card does! This with almost to bump to the voltage! Heat is not an issue with water cooling, lol! The Koolance waterblock is excellent regardless of what some reviews say. I wouldn't buy this card now though with the HD 6970 right around the corner, wait for that to come out and get one of those, or pick up this card once the price drops.