Joined on 12/27/12
Can only use one of them
Pros: Moves a lot of air at a slow rate of speed.. Hey, a fan is a fan!
Cons: It doesn't work with my fan controller. It has to be PWM. Item No. N82E16811998149 One of the grommets got ripped out of one fan when I was removing one of the two fans from the case's side panel.
Overall Review: I can only put one of these in my case, because the CPU cooler was just way too big to put the other one in there. Item No. N82E16835118138 There are two spaces on my case to install 2 x 120 case fans on the side panel of my case, and I put one on the bottom space, next to the spot where the video card is.
Nightmare install
Pros: Length from pump to radiator is sufficient. Can use any fan on the radiator. Light-up pump.
Cons: I had major problems getting this in, like is this thing even compatible with LGA-115X chips at all? The brackets that you have to screw the nuts on at the end never line up properly!
Overall Review: Long story short, my CPU eas overheating, so I've decided to look into watercooling. Did it go as planned? Not really. The first board I had it on didn't want to POST and later I found out what caused it. Some other heatsink I torqued on there had scratched off the traces necessary to make it run. One board swap later and now the posts you have to screw the bolts to the brackets on won't align properly. It would have helped to stick in properly-sized brackets, especially for socket LGA-1151. Also, this is my first time with an AIO cooler before so I really don't know which way to put the radiator for maximum cooling.
Died after 6 months
Pros: Played all my games, even memory-demanding ones RTX-On games worked Decent-quality video upscaling
Cons: GPU died after 6 months
Overall Review: After a while, the computer would start resetting itself without producing a blue screen and would progressively get worse, and then about 6 months in, it quit working; the card would no longer detect on my PC even though the lights were lit and external power was connected.
Daily "Driver"
Pros: Massive storage to put all of my game recordings in... and maybe as a standby when the unexpected happens.
Cons: none
Overall Review: I got this thing because 500 GB was way too small to put all of my gameplay clips on one drive. Also I wanted to use a drive to put my page file on, since I got SSDs, and you wear them out faster if you got one of those on there. Their recommendation is to get at least one hard drive, so there's this. Add to the fact there's 2.71 TB* of storage allows me to record a lot more stuff from my games using the built-in Windows Game DVR, or with ShadowPlay if the latter doesn't work. But it might be cast aside as a "spare drive" in case this SSD fails.
Random crashes after 6 months
Pros: Fast R/W speeds Quick to respond Boots Windows 10 in less than 10 seconds
Cons: Drive disconnects from the rest of the machine for some unknown reason. Already checked cables several times over, they're all firmly plugged in their receptacles. It has started doing this during games, when booting the OS, etc.
Overall Review: This drive has started dropping out after a few I/Os (and by dropping out, I mean the operating system freezes up for a moment before it displays a BSOD, reboots, and gets stuck on a splash screen and does nothing). And that's with switch-mode power supplies that I have used, unfortunately. I tried to stick a MOLEX adapter to plug in the SATA power thinking it would bypass the 3.3v and PWDIS and that didn't work either. The system crashed there, too. Mind you, this drive is 10 months old and has accumulated 63.8 TBW. There is nothing abnormal in the SMART status for the drive. I did want to ask about whether or not my firmware needs to be updated. I won't post the drive's firmware here, else I'll have my review deleted.
Doesn't detect card lock
Pros: Good card reader. Adds onto a machine that doesn't have a spot to put an internal card reader in.
Cons: For some reason, it doesn't detect whether the card is locked, which might be a drawback for most people who might want to keep their data from getting moved off the card by accident. But maybe it might have been ignored on purpose altogether since most of the time I've handled SD cards I've put one in with the slide switch I was sure was in the unlocked position, only to be told the card was locked!
Overall Review: My package almost didn't arrive at my door at all, thanks to a delivery screw-up. I paid almost $10 for 2-day shipping and rush processing, only to find it at my neighbor's house five days late. It was good on them to return the lost package when they did see it. I was looking around for a card reader because my new computer case doesn't have a spot to mount my internal card reader. Rather than choose any "standard" USB card reader, I chose a USB 3,0 card reader with the added ability to read from Micro SD and Memory Stick memory cards.
Success board swap
Looks like they were steps ahead with the BIOS update. I was going to get up and do it, but when the board POSTed for the first time, and I brought it into Q-FLASH, it was already the current version. The board works better than my other board which has seen better days. This board swap was definitely worth the wait.
Got exactly what I needed!
Even despite some shipping delays, I got the exact memory configuration that I needed to upgrade my system with.
If it fits, it ships...
For obvious reasons, I ordered a 12-pack of batteries, and they had to split the thing into one 4-pack and one 8-pack to make it fit in the whole package. Whatever! It still doesn't discount the fact that I got all 12 batteries in one bulk order.