Joined on 03/12/08
And He Swings!
Pros: With my new system, These baddies score a 7.9 on WEI. They defaulted to 9-9-9-28-1T, with a few tweaks, it was running at rated 8-8-8-24-2T. See other thoughts
Cons: The only con I can say about these is the inability to choose your heat spreader color for the same sticks. Blue is cool and all, but I prefer black.
Overall Review: In my new system: Intel Core I5 2500k 2x4 GB of these. MSI Z68A-GD65 GTX 260 I bought these a few months back with the shell shocker. Shockingly, they are now cheaper than what I bought em for. Figures. Ah well, was to be expected. No regrets. Multi-tasking is a cinch.
Review update(DO NOT BUY THIS)
Pros: While this thing worked, it served its purpose, backlit, a keyboard, extra keys on side for convienence. From there, its downhill.
Cons: After a year of use, this keyboard has started to qwerk up, starting with right shift+' not working to make "(left shift still works.) Now its slowly going from ;-a with right shift not capitalizing them. You can see why this can be annoying. I used right shift for the right side of the keys, now have to use left shift to compensate. Tried driver fix, nothing, all lowercase keys work, so it isn't the key itself, and right shift with any other line of keys works fine.
Overall Review: All in all, the keyboard is very, unusable now, due to the shift key becoming useless. I'm very disappointed, as I liked its design, and mechanical key feeling. I can't stand those new flat keys that is all the rage now, I like the resistance of the keys on this keyboard, thats why I bought it. I would have tried out the cyborg keyboard, but I don't want to take another chance, I need a keyboard that is backlit and will last more than a single year, especially with the price I paid for this keyboard at the time: 79.99.
This card is quite the step up from a EVGA GTX 770 2GB
Pros: A few pros for this card: -0rpm fan profile: The fans do NOT spin until the card exceeds 60C. At stock settings, this translates to about 68-70C on load -The card itself is very power efficient at stock settings, pulling a maximum of 119.6 watts. -FPS is locked in at 60 with 90% of the games that I play, Where the 770 mentioned struggled at ~45 on some.
Cons: Overall, I am happy with my purchase, but I have a few small caveats. -Unable to keep the stock clock speed without the power limit being adjusted. A noticeable 2.5-5 fps drop occurs as a result. -1 egg because the product is unable to keep the factory overclock that is advertised without additional power given to the card -The fans can get very loud over 65% fan speed, this is in a Corsair Air 540 case with 3 120mm fans and 3 140mm fans. the Card is significantly louder than all of the others combined. Under 60%, it is very quiet, and normal operation stays under 60%. No eggs taken off. -When overclocking the card, it is unable to push beyond 1350 MHz on core without a substantial voltage boost. As this is out of spec, No eggs knocked off, but it isn't a super great overclocker. It at least can make the settings of the black edition stock clock, but has one less heatpipe, and thus, less cooling capabilities.
Overall Review: I would recommend this to anyone who wants to upgrade from the 700 series cards. Just be sure you buy the 8GB vram edition, because the performance leap is significant for only $20-60 more It's performance is on par with a GTX 980 ti, scoring similar benchmark results on 3DMark Firestrike, Time spy, and Heaven benchmarks, for $200-260.
Updated Review
Pros: Amazing board for the price. Sports integrated RAID, AHCI mode for SATA devices(allows hot plugging.) Z68 Virtu Is nice to have. This coupled with 8 gigs of lightning fast 1600 cl 8 memory, and an Intel Core I5 2500k, makes my old pc seem like it was standing still. 7.5/7.9/7.2/7.2/6.1
Cons: Not Really a con, but some people will find the boot beeping annoying. Its just signaling that there are USB devices plugged in, and the number of beeps is the number of devices. Nice, if your testing bad USB devices.
Overall Review: Well worth the purchase. My HDD which used to score a 5.9, was bumped up to 6.1 in AHCI mode opposed to IDE mode.
This processor...FAST....
Pros: Having tested on a system with this chip at a net café, I can say that this chip FLIES compared to the older generation. That being said, there are certainly chips that are faster out there, like Intel's 900 series past the I7 940, but have prices to match.
Cons: The stock heatsinks aren't really suited for this chip, But everyone knows the stocks aren't meant to be used for overclocking. Regardless, the stock does a good job up to 4.0 Ghz. After that, it starts to get a little to hot for comfort.
Overall Review: Not the product's or manufacturer's fault, but the mobo combo deal I wanted expired the DAY I went to order this chip. Not a major deal, but little bit disheartening. I'll update when I get the system up and running, Gonna be sweet!
The Lazer...Its good.
Pros: 1: started up first time, no problems whatsoever. 2: 850 watts:More than I need, but I plan to keep this one for awhile 3:Gold rated! 4: Pretty lights! 5: Innovative modular design. 6: tough cables! (I accidentally got one caught in my exposed fan blades on my CPU, not even a scuff on the ultra-durable material, and the fan still works too! This thing is incredibly stable compared to my old RAIDMAX 530 watt psu I used to have. No BSOD's from lack of power to components anymore(the rated power decayed with the time i had it, 4 years, it worked well while it worked.)
Cons: It is kind of a high price, given that they have another model for 1 kw at bronze rating for the same price, but I'm done buying cheap psu's.
Overall Review: If you are looking for a PSU to run Twin Graphics card with overclocking room to spare, Get this! Triple is a bit too much for this one tho, rank up to a 1 kw. By the way, a helpful list to determine your PSU needs: 1 Graphics card=550+ 2 Graphics cards= 750+ 3 Graphics cards= 1000+ 4 Graphics cards= 1200+ Keep in mind, running two GTX 580's is possible with this PSU, but NOT two GTX 590's. One 590 is a REALLY good 700 watter, with two, 1200 watts is the way to go.