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Alexander K.

Alexander K.

Joined on 08/24/10

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 6
Most Favorable Review

Mid-Tower Goodness

RAIDMAX Helios ATX-819WB Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
RAIDMAX Helios ATX-819WB Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

Pros: I bought this tower despite the fact that it only had one review. Man was he right though! This tower should have tons of reviews, but it doesn't! For a mid-tower, it's pretty sleek. The inside is very spacious, and one of the hard drive bays can be easily removed by external thumb screws, increasing cord storage from your PSU. Hiding your cords in this thing isn't too bad, either. It's no full tower, but for a mid, it has decent cable management. This sucker can hold any size video card! And it comes with 5 fans preinstalled (Top, Rear, 2 Front, Bottom for PSU). A 6th fan can be purchased for the panel (120mm).

Cons: None that are completely outrageous. The activity lights on the front are a little hard to see where I have it. The plastic lip sort of covers it up from a sitting perspective, if your case is near the ground. But that's not even a real con.

Overall Review: PLENTY of room for all of your cords, cards, and probably kids (though I wouldn't suggest trying to lug around your children in this case)

Most Critical Review

MSI RESPONSE A JOKE

MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC
MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC

Pros: Ran great at first

Cons: Artifacts, BSOD, DVI Port failure, Fan Malfunctions, Overheating, Loud clicking noise, inability to render games for more than 10 minutes... TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SUPPORT! WORST IN BUSINESS BY FAR! MSI SHOULD BE GONE, AND BFG SHOULD'VE STAYED! The list goes on and on and on

Overall Review: This card is full of failure. Too much thermal paste on the GPU, it's literally glopped on. I wrote a bad review once, received a response... Emailed the address they told me to, and THEY NEVER EVER EVEN ONCE RESPONDED TO MY EMAIL. Garbage support, and if you don't mind paying $250+ for a GPU that lasts under 6 months, go ahead and buy it. A garbage GPU, with an incredibly bad and unreliable heatsink and fans that won't last.

Newest component is now the bottleneck

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 4GB G1 GAMING OC EDITION, GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 4GB G1 GAMING OC EDITION, GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD

Pros: Don't get me wrong, this card benchmarks and runs better than my old EVGA GTX760FTW, but that's not the entire story. If you're in to playing heavily modded games or high resolution ultra setting new titles, be careful.

Cons: I use the video card for moderate to heavy gaming. My old 760 FTW ran Skyrim Modded fine, and could handle quite a bit of mods. Most of my modded games ran great on the 760, but I wanted and needed an upgrade and the 970 fit the bill. I would manage my VRAM and keep things around 3 to 3.5 which worked well for me on Skyrim. Things were running great on my new card, and I did notice a nice improvement in my frames and smoothness in play overall. But, then I started to notice the game acting oddly after playing for a while, and decided to try a few other games. It wasn't until I searched google for any driver issues that I read about the 3.5 at full speed and .5 at 1/7th the speed. I thought that maybe there had to be some sort of unlocker I'd have to run or tweak within the Nvidia drivers to fix this, but it just isn't possible. This card was DESIGNED that way. So, I've been forced to actually remove mods in order to maintain stable frames. Is it the end of the world? No. But my decision of purchasing this card was made with MODS IN MIND and this has disabled me.

Overall Review: I understand that if I wanted to future proof my setup, I should have purchased a 980, or maybe SLI two of these, but that wasn't my intention. I'm on a 2 year component cycle for most of my parts, but 1 year on my video cards. This will be lucky to make it past 6 months before I'm sick of dealing with it.

Did the job

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus - CPU Cooler with 4 Direct Contact Heatpipes
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus - CPU Cooler with 4 Direct Contact Heatpipes

Pros: -Works very well, and keeps my AMD X6 1090T 20 degrees cooler under load than my stock air cooler. I hardly graze the 50 Celsius range. -Quiet. My case is much quieter with this unit. -It looks pretty nifty! -Cheap! -Didn't use the thermal paste that came with it, but it looks like quality stuff! Just some more for me to put in my 'random closet full of computer stuffz' as backup.

Cons: -I won't take any points off for this, because I've installed enough computer components over the years to figure most things out. BUT, the clip required to hold the heat sink in place is very confusing to install, and the instructions included is 1 piece of paper with I think 6 steps total? The instructions are basically useless. Also, it may seem like you get extra pieces, but everything that comes with this must be used. If installing on an AMD board like I did, you have to remove the stock heat sink base from the board by taking the board out of your case, and install the new one. It's a bit of a pain in the bum, but worth the time and effort after you see the results.

Overall Review: Worth the price, and the work. Computers have 99 problems but this heat sink ain't 1.

Yusss

SONY MDRXB700 Gold-plated L-shaped stereo mini Connector Circumaural Extra Bass Headphone
SONY MDRXB700 Gold-plated L-shaped stereo mini Connector Circumaural Extra Bass Headphone

Pros: These things get low. Real low, and they sound great. The bass is very intense, but not too overwhelming if you adjust equalizers, but why wouldn't you want bass if you're buying these headphones? They are large, but very comfortable. You could probably do a barrel roll without them coming off of your dome.

Cons: The cord is rather short, and I've found one song that seemed to drop below the low frequency threshold within the first 5 minutes of listening. But, it could also be that they didn't actually have a bass line where I expected one... who knows

Overall Review: Great headphones, great highs and lows, mids are a little weak compared to the two, but nothing serious. Great sound quality, and really make DnB/IDM shine

11/30/2011

Great Card... Minor Hiccups

MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC
MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC

Pros: The card ran great out of the box, and the latest nvidia drivers keep my games up to maximum FPS at maximum settings on a single card setup. -Great size for my Mid-Tower -Runs quiet -Stays very cool -Fast, and more fast

Cons: Well... about a week after owning my new rig (details in other thoughts), something rather odd happened. I had the monitor plugged in to the left DVI port (closest to the MOBO) and the card was artifacting hardcore. Opening Chrome would cause drivers to crash, and restart. Actually, opening anything did this, and video games would artifact beyond belief upon opening... and then crash the drivers. So, I uninstalled the old drivers, and reinstalled drivers. Nothing. I rolled back drivers, installed beta drivers... Nothing. So, I took a more simple approach and connected the monitor to the other DVI port. This caused all problems to stop, and everything is back up and running great. I tried a dual monitor setup, but the left DVI port caused the secondary monitor to crash the display drivers over and over. I tried making the left DVI primary, and had the same issues. Single monitor setup for now.

Overall Review: LITE-ON CD/DVD Burner - Bulk Black SATA Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban6 (02/17/2011) MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX ASRock 870 EXTREME3 AM3 AMD 870 SATA RAIDMAX Helios ATX-819WB Black Steel / Plastic G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II SSD