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Douglas F.

Douglas F.

Joined on 03/14/03

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 16
Most Favorable Review

Nice card, easy to install

MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card RTX 4070 Ti VENTUS 3X 12G
MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card RTX 4070 Ti VENTUS 3X 12G

Pros: Fast. Usable ray tracing. Doesn't run too hot.

Cons: Expensive. What ever happened to mid-to-high-end cards costing under $300? Slight whirring from fans.

Overall Review: With this card and a 5800X I'm getting 19,807 in 3dmark, stock speeds. https://www.3dmark.com/spy/34633426 This card should last me many years. I'd buy it again.

Most Critical Review

Sets the new standard for absolute garbage

TRENDnet TEW-632BRP 300Mbps Wireless N Home Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE802.11n Draft 2
TRENDnet TEW-632BRP 300Mbps Wireless N Home Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE802.11n Draft 2

Pros: It's very difficult to find one nice thing to say about it when they cons outweigh the pros by such a slanted margin.

Cons: Everything else about it. Newegg should make "0" or "no eggs" or even negative eggs an option. Worked for about 3 days. Miserable device. Click on <apply> or <save> or somesuch button in the browser and you'll never hear from the *ahem* again. Tried to set up MAC filtering -- kept complaining about the only valid characters being 0-9, a-f and A-F, which is exactly the set of characters I entered in the MAC field -- verified the numbers over and over and over again, but never accepted them. Must have used the <factory reset> button more than 30 times. I actually can't even remember the problems I had with it initially since it was last year. Tried to give it one more shot lately and it has failed mightily.

Overall Review: It kind of reminds me of a product that was made by sweaty, grimy, hungry people with no choice, trembling in fear while looking up barrel of an AK-47 pointed at them. Runs hot. Do not buy it. You should be grateful it's out of stock -- it never should have been IN stock.

Causes PC to BSOD all the time

SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD with Heatsink 2TB, PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280, Speeds Up-to 7,000MB/s, Best for High End Computing, Workstations and Compatible with Playstation5 (MZ-V8P2T0CW)
SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD with Heatsink 2TB, PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280, Speeds Up-to 7,000MB/s, Best for High End Computing, Workstations and Compatible with Playstation5 (MZ-V8P2T0CW)

Pros: Good size for an NVMe drive. Got it on sale. Replaces an inadequate 1TB gen 3 NVMe drive that worked fine but just wasn't big enough.

Cons: Causes BSOD all the time.

Overall Review: Unless I set my PC's power settings to performance with no power saving settings enabled or at the very least set the PCI express link state power management setting to off it gives me a BSOD for "memory management" randomly -- anywhere from just after reboot/startup to a few hours in. I'm not even convinced setting those settings will work. This is a fresh Windows 11 installation with the most recent BIOS, drivers and firmware. PC was perfectly stable on the old drive. Nothing's loose and there's plenty of power. Ryzen 7 5800x 2x16 GB XPG SPECTRIX D60G DDR4 Asus TUF Gaming 550M-WIFI MSI Mech Radeon RX 6600 XT 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 4.0 ATX Video Card EVGA 650 GQ 210-GQ-0650-V1 80+ GOLD 650W

11/24/2022

Excellent card, would buy again

MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC
MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC

Pros: Fast, especially considering the price. Looks nice. Wasn't sold on the Goldmember look until I put it in my Rosewill Cullinan MZ case. Now I think it looks great -- nice contrast. Reflects RGB lighting from my 4 Corsair HD120 RGB LED fans nicely. Not too loud. Radeon Image Sharpening makes already nice looking games even nicer looking.

Cons: No RGB lighting on it. No real time ray tracing -- not that important as it's possible to do this with an agnostic game engine (Cryengine) without dedicated hardware and only a few games support it now. I'll be due for a whole system upgrade by the time that will matter. I've had a few games crash -- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with DX12 enabled and everything maxed out eventually gives me an out of resources message but that's not the card or the drivers, it's the overhead that DX12 requires. DX11 uses around 6 GB VRAM for the same settings. Had one of my Batman Arkham games produce some weird grey fuzzy screens when enabling AA but now I can't recall what I disabled in the Adrenalin software to fix it. Had the Metro 2033 benchmark crash the first time I ran it but was stable the next 8 runs without changing anything.

Overall Review: Bought this to pair up with my first gen Ryzen 1600X whose RX 480 went on to replace a dead card elsewhere in my network. This card is perfect for this chip. Everything I throw at it runs great at ultra settings at either 1440p or 2160p, depending on the title. Hottest temperature observed: 84 C in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Most of the time it stays in the 60s and 70s. Would definitely buy it again.

12/23/2019

Great paste

ARCTIC MX-4 (4 g) - Premium Performance Thermal Paste for all processors (CPU, GPU - PC, PS4, XBOX), very high thermal conductivity, long durability, safe application, non-conductive, non-capacitive
ARCTIC MX-4 (4 g) - Premium Performance Thermal Paste for all processors (CPU, GPU - PC, PS4, XBOX), very high thermal conductivity, long durability, safe application, non-conductive, non-capacitive

Pros: Definitely cools better than stock paste

Cons: None

Overall Review: I used this product recently to fix an overheating issue on my old PowerColor Radeon RX 480. The card was getting up to 95 C degrees and powering the system down while playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Pulled the HSF, cleaned old paste off, applied a line on the chip and reattached the HSF. The card still runs hot up to 90 C degrees but it's completely stable and I owe it all to this MX-4 2019 edition thermal paste. Good stuff.

Nice looking lights, good airflow

Corsair HD Series, HD120 RGB LED, 120mm High Performance Individually Addressable RGB LED PWM Case Fan (CO-9050067-WW) 3-pack
Corsair HD Series, HD120 RGB LED, 120mm High Performance Individually Addressable RGB LED PWM Case Fan (CO-9050067-WW) 3-pack

Pros: Not too noisy. Vibrant colors.

Cons: Doesn't appear to be compatible with ASRock X370 Killer sli/ac and its software controller so I don't have the type of control over the lights I wanted. Have to use the hardware controller instead.

Overall Review: Pre-tap the holes by screwing the screws in/out with a decent power drill with Phillips head before installing the fans in your case, otherwise you'll end up stripping the heads of the screws because superhuman strength is in fact a prerequisite if you don't.