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Michael A.

Michael A.

Joined on 05/03/01

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 12
Most Favorable Review
Silverstone CFP51-B Aluminum 5.25" to 3.5" bay converter with 120mm fan
Silverstone CFP51-B Aluminum 5.25" to 3.5" bay converter with 120mm fan

Pros: Price, ease of installation, quality, compatibility with case, quiet fan.

Cons: LED Fan? Needed something for my home server, not a disco :D

Overall Review: Great product at an excellent price. I was looking for a converter for my 4x Hitachi T7k250 250GB drives in Raid 5. This unit was perfect, installed into my Coolermaster Centurion case very easily and looks great as well.

Most Critical Review
SAPPHIRE PC-A9RD480Adv 939 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire ATX AMD CrossFire Motherboard
SAPPHIRE PC-A9RD480Adv 939 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire ATX AMD CrossFire Motherboard

Pros: Nicely packaged, good features for the price.

Cons: Could not get board to work. Fans would spin, no beeps, or anything else. Would boot to bios once every ~ 15 tries. Tested with 2 CPUs, 2 memory brands, 3 power supplies, updated bios. Sending back and will order another brand.

Overall Review: I really wanted to get this board to work. The price is great for the offered features but for some reason it just would not work.

Fast, Cool, Quiet

HIS iPower IceQ X² OC Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card H290QMC4GD
HIS iPower IceQ X² OC Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card H290QMC4GD

Pros: Card runs newer games great at 1080p. I can finally max out my settings on World of Tanks but haven't had a chance to play the newer titles like Alien Isolation just yet. The card is very quiet. I can't hear it over my CPU fan while playing games, even when the case is open. Along with being quiet, the card runs very cool.

Cons: Can't really call it a con, but this card is long, probably one of the longest out there. BUT, I accept the trade-off of having a great GPU cooler instead.

Overall Review: My Phenom II 940 at 3.2 (under-volted) is a bottle neck now. This is the perfect case for Mantle. High-end card, mid-tier CPU.

10/30/2014

Nice Kaveri laptop

Acer Laptop AMD A8-7100 6GB Memory 1TB HDD AMD Radeon R5 Series 15.6" Non-Touch Screen Windows 8.1 64-Bit E5-551-89TN
Acer Laptop AMD A8-7100 6GB Memory 1TB HDD AMD Radeon R5 Series 15.6" Non-Touch Screen Windows 8.1 64-Bit E5-551-89TN

Pros: Great Laptop for the money. AMD's New Kaveri Quad core CPU 6 GB Memory where most others only come with 4GB Large HD for this class of computer The screen is good Relatively light weight for a 15.6" laptop. Dedicated numeric keypad

Cons: Nothing here would cause me to deduct from my overall rating: Ram: 4GB x1 + 2GB x1 probably not ideal dual channel solution. Glossy plastic is a smudge magnet Construction could be a little more sturdy Little to no documentation

Overall Review: This laptop was purchased to replace my wife's old Gateway Turion powered laptop. Great for browsing, word, etc. Have not tried gaming just yet. I wish they made a more upscale model with an SSD and 8+ GB memory. I will have to make those upgrades myself which will definitely enhance the overall performance of the machine. ** Make sure you update the BIOS before updating to newest video drivers. Otherwise your graphics will freeze when booting into Windows. BIOS notes show there was a problem that new BIOS fixed. ** There is NO optical drive. This was not an issue for me and figured it would also cut down on weight and price a little bit. For as often as we used it on our old laptop it won't be missed.

XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card HD-485X-ZNFC
XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card HD-485X-ZNFC

Pros: I guess it was good while it worked?? Nice Packaging Native HDMI out which my MSI 4850 512mb lacked.

Cons: I purchased the card new in December 2010. It worked fine in my HTPC until recently. As others have stated, the newer drivers cause the card to hang and crash Windows 7. I am shipping off the card to XFX via an RMA. I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be repaired.

11/29/2011

Great value card with good performance

XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card HD-485X-ZNFC
XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card HD-485X-ZNFC

Pros: Short in length, 1GB memory, pretty quiet.

Cons: None that I can think of

Overall Review: Still waiting for my rebate, so time will tell on that. I installed this card in my HTPC. The machine runs an AMD Athlon X2-4850e (45w) on a Gigabyte 780G motherboard. It is running Windows 7 x64 and XBMC. I was originally using the on-board video via HDMI to a Denon receiver and LG 52" LCD. While the on-board video was adequate for my use I always wanted an add-in card for an upgrade. My preferred choice would have been a Radeon 5770 but for a lower price and better performance I could not beat this 4850. The card is silent when viewing movies but I have yet to really push the GPU with gaming to see how loud it would be. Although ventilation is limited in my Antec case, I have not noticed a significant increase in temps with the new card.