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Andrew L.

Andrew L.

Joined on 12/19/07

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 11
Most Favorable Review

Flawless

AMD Athlon 5350 - Athlon Kabini Quad-Core 2.05 GHz Socket AM1 25W AMD Radeon R3 Desktop Processor - AD5350JAHMBOX
AMD Athlon 5350 - Athlon Kabini Quad-Core 2.05 GHz Socket AM1 25W AMD Radeon R3 Desktop Processor - AD5350JAHMBOX

Pros: Cheap, quick, has good integrated graphics, rock solid.

Cons: Motherboards designed for this processor generally only have 2 SATA ports, the stock fan can be noisy.

Overall Review: I use this primarily for Windows Media Center in Windows 7.1 as my cablecard DVR. It is paired with a silicondust HDHOMERUN Prime, and it works very very well. It has enough power to browse the web while windows media center is running on a 1080p display simultaneously, and with an SSD boots into windows very quickly. Zero real complaints here.

11/27/2015
Most Critical Review

Would not buy again

CORSAIR Builder Series CX430 CMPSU-430CX 430W ATX12V Active PFC Power Supply
CORSAIR Builder Series CX430 CMPSU-430CX 430W ATX12V Active PFC Power Supply

Pros: Non-doa, quiet fan, paint is nice

Cons: After buying a CMPSU-400CX before I expected a lot more out of this supply, what I found was Samxon caps, a sleeve bearing fan, and generally much poorer build quality than I was accustomed to from corsair. The unit died 2 months after the warranty ended from buldging Samxon capacitors, and even if that were not the case I still would have voided the warranty by opening the unit to look at it

Overall Review: Although it could be said the build quality was better than a bargain basement power supply, it was not what I was looking for after all the other corsair power supplies I bought up to that point. At least it didn't take anything out when it died. Best advice I can give anyone is research the exact power supply you want to buy, as like this one the OEM was different than whoever made the 400cx, and the quality suffered despite the name badge on the thing.

Cheap and awesome!

ASUS E35M1-M PRO Fusion AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, Dual-Core) AMD Hudson M1 Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo
ASUS E35M1-M PRO Fusion AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, Dual-Core) AMD Hudson M1 Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo

Pros: Super cheap, low power, good graphics, many sata ports, great htpc platform!

Cons: The included fan was rather silly and noisy, the network card drivers on the included cd were unstable

Overall Review: I bought two of these boards due to how cheap they were and was really surprised! it was everything I wish the Atom was but wasn't at the time. They were very fast for how cheap they were, and handled the video from my silicondust hd homerun prime very well over the years. I ran one off a itx 'brick' power supply and it didn't pull more than 40 watts with a hard drive under full load, and I used another with flash media encoder and a blackmagic card as a video streaming solution for a while too. I wish I had bought more, they were like cheap pc swiss army knives!

Cheap and sturdy field machine

Acer Aspire One AOD250-1924 Black Intel Atom N270(1.60 GHz) 10.1" WSVGA 1GB Memory 160GB HDD Netbook
Acer Aspire One AOD250-1924 Black Intel Atom N270(1.60 GHz) 10.1" WSVGA 1GB Memory 160GB HDD Netbook

Pros: Durable and cheap, 6 cell battery meant a good battery life.

Cons: I've repaired many with power jacks that have been displaced through abuse, they could have made it a little more sturdy there.

Overall Review: Mine has survived falling from a flight of stairs and other abuse that I wouldn't put an expensive computer through. I've used them in a pinch to do many tech related things, and being so compact and lightweight I had a bag with 3 of them ready to go at any given time. A little slow at times, and the resolution can be a bit small or restrictive if the program wasn't meant to be displayed on anything less than x768 pixels, generally you could work around most diag software, and the form factor made it more than convenient.

One of the best investments I ever made

ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard
ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Motherboard migrated several platforms, going through 4 different cpu upgrades, ending up with a Phenom II x6 1075T and a Radeon 6870. Asus and AMD both released updated drivers and bios to support the new hardware despite me still running Windows XP x64 at the time. I finally gifted this motherboard to another member of my family when finding out upgrading my pc to 16gb of ddr2 would have been more expensive than buying an openbox sabretooth 990fx and 16gb of ddrt3, and it is still running fine and stable to this day. Great motherboard ASUS!

Cons: Ram heatsinks seemed to cook the ram more than it cooled it, I had to set the timings on my 1066 ram manually to get it to the advertised speeds and more importantly, the proper stability. Also if I recall correctly the network adapters were unstable until you downloaded the newer drivers from the marvell site.

The product is great! Cable companies on the other hand...

SiliconDust HDHR3-CC HDHomeRun PRIME 3-Tuner US CableTV with CableCARD Stream Premium Channels and Cut the Cord
SiliconDust HDHR3-CC HDHomeRun PRIME 3-Tuner US CableTV with CableCARD Stream Premium Channels and Cut the Cord

Pros: I've owned 2 of these for quite some time, and the product and support are wonderful. You can generally always get one on one support through IRC too!

Cons: The cable company! if they even know what you have might jerk you around a bit. You may or may not also need another flaky box sadly not designed by silicondust to tune to "SDV" Switched Digital Video channels, and sometimes it's easier just to tell the people at the other end of the line that you have a 'tivo box' to avoid being transferred to internet support. I find my SDV box, a Cisco STA 1520, freezes up every so often, and you can generally tell from the HDHR logs what's going on. There are a whole lot of pitfalls one can get on this system, so if you expect something to just "work" this might not be for you! Expect to spend hours on support while you pair and re-pair cablecards, expect the cable company to screw up your subscriptions when you return your regular cable box, and expect to have to play games with them to get it to work. The more you know the better you are off, search the internet for your provider and other people who use the hdhr, check the silicondust forums, ask questions in the IRC, when all is said and done you will have yourself a really kickbutt media center with cable and 3 tuners at your disposal!

Overall Review: You definitely want to make sure your network is up to the task of delivering traffic to your devices. I would stay away from wifi, and I would use pro-sumer or pro grade gigabit switches if you can. The lower the latency and the fewer dropped packets the better. If you don't know how to configure a router, this product might not be for you though.