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Eric S.

Eric S.

Joined on 11/27/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 6
Most Favorable Review

Just blows away the other models I tried

Westinghouse 24" WUXGA LCD Monitor 8 ms 1920 x 1200 D-Sub, HDMI-HDCP, Composite, S-Video, YPbPr L2410NM
Westinghouse 24" WUXGA LCD Monitor 8 ms 1920 x 1200 D-Sub, HDMI-HDCP, Composite, S-Video, YPbPr L2410NM

Pros: Blows away sammy 24" models I tried. No dead pixels, no bright/dark areas, just clean beautiful uniform color. No tearing or distortion of any kind, absolutely beautiful.

Cons: Doesn't come with a DVI to HDMI cable that you will need to run this with a computer to get a good picture (don't use the vga port). The speakers are too weak to use this as a television in a large room, but in an office it will work.

Overall Review: It uses an MVA panel I believe unlike most of the 24" models which use a TN panel. I can see this monitor great even at side/up/down viewing angles. Again, I use it for gaming and no problems whatsoever. Make sure vsync and triple buffering are on.

Most Critical Review

huge mistake

OCZ Nocti Series 120GB Mini-SATA (mSATA) MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) NOC-MSATA-120G
OCZ Nocti Series 120GB Mini-SATA (mSATA) MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) NOC-MSATA-120G

Pros: none

Cons: brand new thinkpads for my wife and myself.. (x220 and T420). This drive when put into either of our laptops causes endless blue screens of death. There are no firmware updates available from OCZ and the minute that we take the drive out of our laptops the problem goes away.

Overall Review: never buying an OCZ again

game changing

RAZER Naga Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Mouse
RAZER Naga Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Mouse

Pros: Plenty of buttons for mmorpgs. The shape of the mouse fit my hand perfectly and I liked how easy it was to program the buttons in ANY game.. not just WOW.

Cons: Took about a full day of play to get used to the layout..

Overall Review: You are not meant to be able to hit all 17 buttons without moving your hand.. some of them are 'rocker' style buttons you need to use the lower/bottom portion of your thumb to hit.

great cooler

SILVERSTONE NT01-E 2 x 60mm fans (optional) CPU Cooler
SILVERSTONE NT01-E 2 x 60mm fans (optional) CPU Cooler

Pros: Keeps my core i3-540 media center at reasonable temperatures and is of course... silent.

Cons: none really - if you use this for whait it is intended for.

Overall Review: On many micro atx motherboards, this heat sink will interfere with a graphics card in the primary pci express slot. I use the built in intel HD graphics to power my media center so this was not an issue for me. I believe you can change the direction the heat sink sits at, but make sure you think your case layout through before buying this.

nothing but problems so far

Intel Core i3-530 - Core i3 Clarkdale Dual-Core 2.93 GHz LGA 1156 73W Intel HD Graphics Desktop Processor - BX80616I3530
Intel Core i3-530 - Core i3 Clarkdale Dual-Core 2.93 GHz LGA 1156 73W Intel HD Graphics Desktop Processor - BX80616I3530

Pros: The chip is fast enough, no problems there. Using it in an HTPC to play 1080p content, and other media related tasks. Seems to run COOL (31C idle), and the stock cooler is not very loud.

Cons: The integrated graphics on the cpu itself has major driver issues. Massive tearing problems when hooked up to both LCD monitors and plasma TV. The drivers are very 'new' and seem to have a lot of issues, even with a fresh install of windows 7. The built in TrueHD audio streaming worked without a hitch.. The video quality OUTSIDE of the tearing issue actually looks great... now if only intel would release a chipset driver for the HD integrated graphics that didn't tear so bad. . The drivers for this cpu(and integrated graphics) do not work right with custom resolutions which always used to work fine for me with ATI/NVIDIA solutions.

Overall Review: If you buy this chip, there is a good chance you are buying it for the integrated graphics. Hopefully intel gets a few driver fixes out fairly quickly.

Works well with Linux

ASUS M3N78-VM AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
ASUS M3N78-VM AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Works well with newest beta of opensuse (11.1). I have HDMI running to my receiver from this motherboard and both HDMI video and audio are working, albeit you need to understand linux pretty well to get this working. I got tearing at first when watching TV in linux, but this was solved by disabling compiz/desktop effects. I have an athlon LE-1600 and I can play high def video (not h.264/bluray) with no stuttering or tearing. All of the USB ports, e-sata, etc worked perfectly in linux (kernel 2.6.27+).

Cons: Won't work out of the box with mythdora5, mythbuntu8, etc because this hardware wasn't released at the time of their creation. Requires installation of newest nvidia driver from their website in order to make the HDMI video/optical work correctly with linux. Probably won't be supported "out of the box" until the next version of mythdora and mythbuntu are released.

Overall Review: The first thing I did was update the bios. I have only tried HDMI audio in linux but it required setting up alsa's /etc configuration files and then changing the digital "HDMI" device to be the default. After that it worked in mythtv by specifying ALSA:Default as my sound source. The HDMI video pretty much worked without fuss after install nvidia's newest drivers.

11/26/2008