Joined on 01/20/04
Amazing Subwoofer!
Pros: This sub is super musical. I play up to 80% music and television and then some movies but not too much. I have the polk monitor 50's and this sub blends so well with the speakers you almost cannot tell the bass is coming from the corner like a lot of subs. This sub is distortion free, deep and clean bass it is amazing. The looks are fantastic too with its minimalistic design of the grill and the rounded edges on everything and the bottom firing port as well as the inset woofer are really fantastic. This sub looks like much more expensive subwoofers and sounds like much more expensive subwoofers but at a fraction of the price.
Cons: This subwoofer has almost zero cons at all I cannot find anything I do not like about it. This is my favorite sub I have ever had and I have had my share as big as the polk psw505 some klipsches, yamahas etc. The one thing others may find as a con is the low end extension wont go below about 35 hz some might be turned off by this to me I don't mind if in a move it rolls off a bit on the low end, seems to make tv commercials not too boomy either when they get louder.
Overall Review: Use a good subwoofer cable with this unit. I would not recommend this for floor speakers bigger than the monitor 50s because I think the monitor 60s or 70s with the additional woofers and using a good receiver or amp will be able to play louder and lower than this sub on its own although I did not turn the gain all the way up to see just how loud it gets it will get overwhelmed by the loudness of bigger speakers at high volumes.
Good but needs modification
Pros: Thought this was a spectacular deal at 34 dollars but in the end its not as good a deal and it is a MUST that you replace the cheap 800rpm fans that make ZERO airflow with something better. Get the rosewill 4pk blue led fans they are the right matching color with the blue front led and for me also my power supply and mouse, typical aqua blue. these fans are 1200 rpm which is just right for noise and cooling. NEXT you need to take the front panel off, i realized the front fan is sandwiched inside the inner metal holes and the front panel plastic bars followed by foam filter then the wire mesh on the front all of which is too constricting and too close to the fan causing excessive wind noise if you choose anything faster than 1200rpms fans and still NO cooling power reaching the middle of the case. SO take the front panel off carefully remove the wire mesh and cut "I used a box cutter" the plastic bars off to make a regular sqaure in front of the fan and take out that cheap filter and
Cons: then reapply the wire mesh, now your front fan has a few more milimeters between its blades and the wire mesh which gives you less air noise as well as no filter and no bars which is just plaing too much stuff in front of a fan, second you get more VOLUME going into the case its not super substantial as there is metal holes the fan is blowing through but it IS way more noticable, I am not going to cut the metal inside as the black paint will get marred and i dont want to dissasemble the system now. My cpu was idling which is the amd x2 260 dual core at 31c with the stock cooler now its right now 27c, these numbers are though the program speccy, i dont know if there accurate as the motherboard shows hotter numbers but know it is a 4c drop in temperature. To top all this off the front fan looks WAY better now than before as it only has the thin wire mess in front of it so the ligth from the leds isnt masked compared to the rear fan. Now I am entirely happy with this case its cooling and
Overall Review: looks were improved in a matter of minutes.
Amazing Subwoofer
Pros: I have owned so many subwoofer in the budget range. I have had the velodyne vx11, velodyne impact 10, definitive pro sub 60, definitive pro sub 600, energy esw- c8, a 10 inch klipsch rpw10, polk psw111 and probably others I cannot remember. The key is this one on sale was cheaper or equal in price than any of these models. This thing is deep, natural, pleasant bass and immensely powerful. The fit and finish is unbelievable and it looks just plain amazing. I find no flaws with this unit. I have it way below halfway and its pure deep bass. I think it will reach 30hz flat easy in my room if not more. If this goes on sale I would buy one for sure. Even if it was 299.99 it would be worth it vs the competition in my opinion. Blends nicely with my polk tsi 400's. in my room 80hz crossover sounds better than 60hz crossover on the speakers.
Cons: Absolutely none. arrived in one day shipping, got amazing sale pricing, best subwoofer I have ever had. Works very well with todays music of hip hop, and dance doesn't distort at all. woofer quality looks amazing, ribbed eliptical surround on woofer is key to low distortion and it works. amp is full featured, cabinet quality is above other brands for sure. dual vents come out the bottom for no distortion or wall interaction, feet have plenty of height if your carpet is sort of tall. Grill is great quality and easy to put on and off. Other companies should take a look at what energy is doing and follow them. Never had a sub so easy to setup, just took it out of the box put it where I wanted 6 inches from the wall on the side wall set crossover to 80 blended volume and its perfect. Also never had a subwoofer that looks as good as this one, it looks really expensive, better in person than the pictures online show. Just buy this one!
Overall Review: Most subwoofers I see online the reviews talk about how its so weak to give it time to break in and then it starts sounding amazing. This sub seems to have a pretty tight woofer from the factory and yet it is the first sub that really sounds amazing right out of the box from minute one. I cannot imagine how much better its going to get in 50 hours much less a few months of good use. Im sure it will be more musical and deeper than it is now which is gonna blow my mind. Never been so happy with a newegg purchase than this one.
Great System!
Pros: Clear powerful sound, nice subwoofer. I replaced the energy rc micro system with this. I thought that system was good but this one is better especially with the satellites. They are much more room filling and louder and cleaner and as good as the quality is on the energy these are build better and heavier and surprisingly are not much bigger but the sound is worth it. Honestly the energy subwoofer might dig a little deeper and the definitive sub is hard to place compared to the energy sub. I find this sub actually sounds best right in the corner in my room and now that I found its sweet spot it is very good.
Cons: None. I did have a defective pro sub 60. It worked fine out of the box but if i got near the woofer and turned it up enough to get it to work a little but not distort it would vibrate. Called definitive tech and got the new one ASAP the new one is perfect. By looking at the attention to detail put into the build qaulity of these systems I think it was just a bad driver I am not upset about it and have been taken care of by Definitive.
Overall Review: Take the time to place the sub with this system because if its not right the system will not sound good. Also for my system using a Harman Kardon receiver using their recommended option 1 hookup which is using the older fashion high level connectors on the back of the sub which they say makes it blend with the speakers better is not true for me. I get cleaner and deeper and more pronounced bass with the lfe cable and the speakers are cleaner hooked right to the receiver. I also enjoy being able to adjust the crossover and even mild volume adjustments if necessary from the receiver vs crawling behind the sub to adjust it the other way. FYI I think 120hz seems pretty good for the satelites.
Nice card
Pros: I like this card its a vast upgrade from an ati 5670. I did not think it would be that much more of an upgrade but its substantial. Overclocking wise mine seems to be a good one on the ram. I can run at 1125mhz or 4500 effective from the stock 3600 ram I am not finding many over that number. This also seems to give the greastest fps increase much more than overclocking the core. I game at 1920x1080 so that might be the memory bandwidth increase but its a lot of difference overclocked. I am shooting to get the core stable but I am waiting on an arctic cooling accerlero twin turbo which seems to be stock on the sapphire and ecs cards and i asked the company they said it fits. The stock cooler on this to me is loud as I came from an HIS silent cooler on my old ati card and the stock cooler handles the stock clocks fine but wont handle overclocking without being close to the artifact limit and noise is too much.
Cons: I flashed my bios to lock in my memory speed so i dont need msi afterburner to overclock it anymore but I also needed to go into the bios to change the voltage maximum so the slider in msi afterburner works right. Once i find the max core with the new cooler ill find what voltage i need and set that in the bios later.
Overall Review: To test max overclocking I am using OCCT for 30 mins which seems to stress the card to insane levels and then ill follow with furmark for 30 mins then gaming 1 hour. .
Great processor
Pros: Update from previous review. instead of 3.4ghz i now have this overclocked to 3.7ghz! a black edition 3.5ghz cost 185 dollars in comparison, this has the same deneb die same l3 cache and 4 cores after unlocking it and went from 3.1 to 3.7ghz. All i can say is wow, I paid 68 dollars for this thing. wei score is 7.4 on par with any chips at 3.4ghz or higher. I got 3.7ghz by increasing FSB to 240, leaving multiplier alone, adding .05volts to the cpu core and moving the hypertransport from 2000 to 1800 after overclock giving me 2160 hyper transport speed. I did run prime 95 it was unstable at the 4th test, after testing slowing down the chip as low as 3.6ghz nothing was changing so I figured if i have the fsb at 240 i need more NB voltage, pushed it from 1.2 to 1.25 and now 2 prime 95s in a row stable, good enough for me, also gaming stable. 600mhz overclock is not too bad.
Cons: Anyone trying to reach over 3.4 to 3.5 try lowering your hypertransport links and then upping the fsb and adding voltage to the cpu core and NB appropriately. This chip scores 10 seconds in WPRIME32 which is better than the more expensive core i3 2.9ghz overclocked to 3.7ghz those chips are scoring in the 12's only with 4 threads.