Joined on 01/12/08
mostly good for the price...
Pros: Cheap, pretty decent for the price. Small.
Cons: Flimsy front USB ports. Giant protruding power button easy to bump when you don't want to.
Overall Review: If you're trying to keep the pric low and the space small, this is it. Just be creful with the USB ports and the giant power button... It you want perfection, pay more.
Rebate Debacle
Pros: I'm not sure. I hope it works. I don't know yet. It hasn't arrived.
Cons: The product itself may be great. I really don't know yet. My complaint is with the Mail In Rebate. I ordered it within 1 hour of receiving the promotional email. The time frame for sending in for the Mail In Rebate has now passed, and I haven't even gotten the product yet! Upon further reading, I find that the Mail In Rebate is being denied for those fortunate enough to have gotten it in on time and done everything right.
Overall Review: I will NEVER buy another OZC product. I haven't even used this one yet, but their handling of the Mail In Rebate is absolute FAILSCAM. I will never knowingly do business with an organization like that. I will NEVER buy another Mail In Rebate promo from newegg. Sure, it wasn't their idea. But they advertised it, promoted it, shipped it, made money off of me with it, etc. Credit me $20, or lose me as a MIR promo customer.
Impulse buy...
Pros: Says waht it does and does waht it says. Got it on sale for less than I paid for a much less powerful netbook only a few weeks ago. 500GB drive. HDMI. It's significantly faster than my higher clocked desktop i3, haven't looked into why that is yet. Probably the 1st Generation 2TB hard drive I have in the desktop holding it back.
Cons: Max RAM is 8GB. Low Rez monitor.
Overall Review: I've wanted to replace my desktop i3 machine for a while. Immediately ditched Winblows for xUbuntu 13 encrypted root. Everything works. Was a refurb on sale. Definitely worth it. It's not a powerhouse, but it's not meant to be. Thanks to not wasting resources on Winblows, I can still run my VMs on 4GB RAM, but I'll bump it up to 8GB at my leisure.
Can't find a reason to complain about this board
Pros: It says what it does and does what it says. super cheap. Runs great. Even has some overclocking features.
Cons: No USB 3.0. Since I lack the ability to care about USB 3.0, it isn't really a con for me, but it might be for some so I mentioned it. It's not very expandable, only 2 slots, one obviously for video. Again, I lack the ability to care about that, but some might. It's a uATX board. A REALLY uATX board. If you care about these things, you shouldn't be looking at this board anyway.
Overall Review: If you just want a cheap, reliable board, this is it. Buy one. Used my olde 2TB WD drive. Whole computer, with 1155 i3 CPU was under $300. Cannot possibly complain about that. I'll drop in an i5 K-series when I get a few more bucks.
Burn in failll
Pros: Intel delivers, just like always.... Sad AMD isn't keeping up anymore.
Cons: Had a bit of trouble getting the thermal pad to burn in. Kept crashing and locking up. Had me running in circles trying to figure out what was wrong. It was just overheating. Took a week and a half for the thermal pad to burn in properly, not sure why; all is fine now. The Integrated Video Drivers on Open Source Platforms are incomplete. Lacks many of the proper rendering facilities. Lots of work-arounds and fixes in software to get it going right. Intel doesn't usually do things fail, but they sure did on this one...
Overall Review: If you run Open Source and want any 3D support, just get a CPU that doesn't have the Intel HD Graphics and save a few bucks for a real video card. You'll be forced to use a real card simply because Intel's HD Graphics driver support is tragically fail... It's performance would be just fine, but they didn't finish the drivers and refuse to come back to it and do the job right.
Fail
Pros: I wouldn't know.
Cons: Manual that came with the card is not for this card. The one and only diagram clearly shows outputs and overall shape and size that are NOT this card. Requires special power connector that would require replacing my power supply that has nothing wrong with it. Oh, yeah, except for some special plug made just for this card...
Overall Review: Wasted my money. Special power plug is not mentioned anywhere, and no, it is not a normal plug that a normal power supply would have. Will just have to sell it now to recoup some of my losses. I'm really getting fed-up with newegg's deals. They always turn out to be rotten eggs... bogus MIRs, now unsupported proprietary 'must have it' plugs going unmentioned.... Bleh.