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Ian K.

Ian K.

Joined on 09/01/03

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 39
Most Favorable Review

1080p/30 on the cheapi(ish)

Canon VIXIA HF11 Black 1/3.2" CMOS Sensor 2.7" 211K LCD 12X Optical Zoom Dual Flash Memory HD Digital Camcorder
Canon VIXIA HF11 Black 1/3.2" CMOS Sensor 2.7" 211K LCD 12X Optical Zoom Dual Flash Memory HD Digital Camcorder

Pros: Excellent image quality. 1080p/30 option. Decent manual options. Accurate color.

Cons: Accessory cost is pretty crazy. Narrow field of view, but the wider angle adapter fixes that.

Overall Review: Running this on Win7 X64 and Sony Vegas. I've been a big canon fan since my first real digital camera. This flash based camcorder is a great unit. I tried the Panasonic equivalent but the colors were all cartoonish and over saturated while the 1080p mode was useless with tons of blur and artifacts. Canon is great. If you want another option: look at Sony, my last HD cam was a fist gen Sony unit and it was also excellent.

Most Critical Review

Revising my review: don't buy this...

Aluratek ADMPF311F 11" 11" Digital Photo Frame with 1GB Memory
Aluratek ADMPF311F 11" 11" Digital Photo Frame with 1GB Memory

Pros: It has a lot of memory.

Cons: Slow USB 16bit color (aka "true color") dithering obvious. Poor contrast ratio: blacks are gray. Like an old LCD from five years ago. Cannot play MJPEG from modern Canon digicam. Cannot play MPEG2. Cannot play WMV, but the manual claims it can. Screen is 1024x768, but the aspect is 16:9. All content gets scaled in some manner.

Overall Review: The attraction of this device was the large memory and the large screen size. The screen is poor and the image quality is weak. Compared to a smaller Philips digital frame this one is quite inferior. Great feature set, if the features actually worked, but most of them do not.

10/23/2007

Failed in less than 12 hours

Seasonic PRIME Ultra 650W 80+ Titanium Power Supply, Full Modular, 135mm FDB Fan w/Hybrid Fan Control, ATX12V & EPS12V, Power On Self Tester, SSR-650TR
Seasonic PRIME Ultra 650W 80+ Titanium Power Supply, Full Modular, 135mm FDB Fan w/Hybrid Fan Control, ATX12V & EPS12V, Power On Self Tester, SSR-650TR

Pros: Modular and looks good

Cons: Failed in less than 12 hours.

Overall Review: I'll maybe revise this depending on the RMA/Return experience. This was a new home server build. Once up and running let sit idle over night. Woke up to dead box. Motherboard lights functioned but other than that zero activity and could not power on or post. Plugged in spare PSU and was able to POST. Will diagnose more, but I suspect this is a failed unit.

Works. Will thottle on Core i7-8700 even in open air (NOT SURPRISING)...

Noctua NH-L9i, Premium Low-Profile CPU Cooler for Intel LGA1200 & LGA115x (Brown)
Noctua NH-L9i, Premium Low-Profile CPU Cooler for Intel LGA1200 & LGA115x (Brown)

Pros: Super compact. Works in NAS chassis like U-NAS 810. This is a fantastic compact cooler. Just know what you're getting it for, and set expectations.

Cons: Cannot move heat fast enough to allow prolonged turbo on the faster LGA 1151 parts.

Overall Review: I installed this in a u-nas 810 chassis. The fit and finish is top notch Noctua. But even with the top off the case this cooler will not allow full CPU perf. I suspected that would be the case, so I'm not going to dock it a star. I knew what I was getting when I bought it.

Code 28. Does not "just work"

Rosewill RHRC-11002 - Windows 7 Certified MCE IR Remote Controller / Win 8 MCE + Small USB Dongle Type with Netflix CD
Rosewill RHRC-11002 - Windows 7 Certified MCE IR Remote Controller / Win 8 MCE + Small USB Dongle Type with Netflix CD

Pros: IR dongle great form factor.

Cons: Remote itself cheap. Don't need it though. It does work with the other MC IR receivers I have. Dongle "bangs out" in device manager with code 28. Other MCE IR receivers work.

Solid. Reliable

Intel S3420GPV ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1156 Intel 3420 DDR3 1333
Intel S3420GPV ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1156 Intel 3420 DDR3 1333

Pros: Solid and reliable, this board has been running my home server for about a year.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: I am not using the onboard controller except for the boot disk (60GB intel SSD). I have been running this for about a year. Previously with WHS V1, now with Win8 for host OS duties and Server 2K12 in hyper-v for backups. This has been flawless to-date. As it is behind a UPS I have had 100% uptime to-date. I'm running an Areca 1230 raid controller with five 2TB disks as RAID 5 configured as four 2TB volumes that are aggregated in Win8 via Storage Spaces as a simple pool. Perf in the configuration is outstanding. This server also hosts Plex and with a I3-530 handles trans-coding fine.