Pros: meant for htpc but just for kicks, tested - Skyrim on ultra, anisotropic filtering off, Anti aliasing x4 all other options tacked on, running at 1600 x 900 with 55-60 fps stable. gets a 7.3 out of 7.9 cpu score on windows index. 6.4 out of 7.9 in GPU scores on the index. cheap compared to what intel's offering at this price. an Okay quad core + an integrated card thats strong as a 50 dollar card.

Cons: -horrible heatsink -overheating causes CPU to under perform. -cant go cheap with a motherboard/psu

Overall Review: technically 4.5 stars not 5 because of the crazy temps with the stock fan. it was idling around 45 and maxing out at 96 degress celcius after 5 MINUTES of prime 95, i'm pretty darn sure that it has to do with the cheap msi fm2 board i got for 50 dollars here on newegg. I built this htpc for my family's living room having a 200$ budget. I used parts from an old pentium 3 dell such as the case, hard drive, cd drive and 300w power supply. the high temps are most likely due to the poor quality power supply and cheap motherboard those two parts are underrated, make sure you give them enough budget room if your planning on a long term build. I had to buy a cooler master 212 evo plus for it, the idle temperature is higher at 50*c but max temps are now at 70 after several hours of prime95. problems gone, The computer's more than my family could ever hope for, even plays PCSX2 (PS2) emulators and older systems for all the kids visiting our house. very good APU for budget gamers, dont even bother getting the Radeon HD 6670 to crossfire with, its a horrible card thats not worth the money. The onboard graphics by itself scores a 668 passmark rating, the 6670 cost 60$ has a rating of 1003 crossfired. Spend 25 dollars more and get the HD 7750 and you get a rating of 1586 which is waay better for the money. Hell, since you saved soo much on a processor, Look up the hd 7770 or 7850 and you wont have to worry about upgrades for years.

Pros: can get very loud. decent subwoofer. pretty much these are bass great

Cons: you have to have a good sound card which allows you to adjust the levels of bass and lower midrange in the satellights. without proper adjustment, the sound distorts and makes a noticeable static noise from being pushed to hard, (like speakers overflooded with bass). the highs are great but the midrange for the satellights is horrible/very lacking. even with a good sound card, i noticed that they cannot go louder than 85% volume without making static noise, it cant handle higher volume midrange at all. * one thing about the subwoofer, it offers great smooth bass and goes fairly low frequencies BUT the SPL level sucks, it doesnt give the thump in a lot of music, but more like a thundering sound shaking your walls. it also smells like hot glue when at high volumes, kinda doubting the longevity of these speakers.

Overall Review: overall, its an okay system but i'd recommend putting in an extra 20$ the klipsh pro media 2.1 sounds are a lot cleaner and less muddy with better mids and highs, slightly, i mean veeerrry slighly weaker bass but its 2x clearer, no muddy sounds. They also list full specifications while these z623s hide SPL, power efficiency, frequency range, thd, signal to noise ratio. if your hell bent on a heavy bass system, try to look around for the older z2300s which is in every way better then the z623s other notes i'd recommend getting a subwoofer stand to have a more accurate/overall better bass sound and also replace all their wires with copper/gold wires, trust me it makes the largest difference to a semi-audiophile/cheapskate-audiophile

Pros: Its a mac, prestige, looks, w/e else is associated with the mac name. Stable, simple to use operating system. lots of apps battery life Good Digital Audio Codec (DAC) for clean sound.

Cons: price, duh graphics card cannot handle resolution spec whatsoever, if you have any knowlege at all about graphic cards, you'd know the gtx 650 mobile is low end by today's standards for laptops in this price range. If you seriously think this is one of the best laptops out there, in this price range, you are either a serious computer noob that grew up with apple or just some clueless consumer with money to spend that's heavily influenced by friends. Like all these other reviewers that think they are getting true 2800x1800p Do yourself a favor, search up other laptops in this price range, and you'll see a beastly processor, a beastly SSD, a beastly graphics card, best of all, it wont even cost as much as this, the secret is to buy laptops with good hardware, and install the operating system of your choice on it. YES you can have IOS on a stronger reliable laptop thats cheaper than this laptop even after adding the cost of the IOS.

Overall Review: got this for my wife, was thoroughly not impressed at all. besides the battery life, operating system and mediocre SSD and the so called Retina screen which is a major marketing gimmick, like peak power vs RMS true power ratings in car audio. Nothing from this laptop warrants the 2.6k price tag, its worth at most 1.6k from the hardware and software. Remember, Just because its from apple, doesn't make it the best item on the market. Like bose and beats by dre audio, overmarketed, over-hyped by people. REMEMBER people are VERY biased towards the product that they shelled out thousands of dollars for, they will never admit that its a mediocre product because it will just make them look silly(in they minds)

Pros: every modern GPU Intensive game played with waaaaay over 60 FPS yes that includes bf3 and crysis 2 and even console emulators which actually stressed the card more than crysis 2. It worked wonders even with my old 300 watt stock hp pavilion PSU but now that i upgraded to a 730 watt psu, the graphics got even better... i didn't think it was even possible to look better than before.. it was coming alive. paired with gigabyte 970 ud3 board AMD FX 8320 processor overclocked to 4.2ghz raidmax 730 watt psu 8g 1600 ddr3 ram

Cons: sorta power hungry but its what you should expect when buying higher tier cards. pretty darn hot temperatures. on max load i get 68 degrees C NOTE: i took off the heatsink and replaced the thermal compound with some spare Arctic silver 5 laying around and the temps dropped to 64*C on load so replace the stock thermal grease ASAP.

Overall Review: the orange color of the card always makes me freak out and thinking to myself that the card burnt out every time i look at it lol.

Pros: -easily installed on a gigabyte 970 ud3 motherboard -pretty decent performance on all games @stock clock. 26 degrees idle and 45 degrees under load. -Easily overclocked to 4.2 ghz (keeping it low because i have a mid-low range board) using Easytune6 with stable voltage and temps going at 26 degress C at idle and 50 degrees C under load NOTE: this is with the stock heatsink. -Blazing fast when overclocked. 5 minute 1080P videos fully load and buffer within 35 seconds... even with cruddy dsl. - out of the box stock, the windows index was 6.8 out of 7.9 - after overclocking i got a 7.8 out of 7.9 index

Cons: -hella cheap compared to the i5 3570k when shipping and taxes are factored in. -still feels a little sluggish at stock clocks. when opening up programs/internet/startup, data transfers and everyday multitasking pc usage.(all of that went away after i overclocked oh my Jebus its fast) -cruddy heatsink with cruddy thermal paste. if i were you, i'd switch out the thermal paste as soon as possible, the stock paste might even ruin your processor because even after five days, it felt like my processor was super glued to the heat sink and took forever to take it off to replace it with aftermarket paste. -Pretty limited overclocking potential compared to the fx 8350 from what i've seen at overclocker forums. With proper setup is the projected high stable clock is around 4.6-4.8 ghz. with mid to high range boards, 5.0 and over if you really spend you time on it.

Overall Review: initially i was going for a super budget system and was deciding whether to get an i3 220k ivy, the fx 8329, or fx 6300, or an fx 4300, a phenom II x4 965 BE, soo glad i chose the 8320 or i'd be bottlenecked. This processor should last you a good 4 years until it gets outdated so overclock safely to your heart's content. besides running prime 95 and regular benchmarks, since it said 8 threads i had a crazy idea of opening up 8 games at once - BF 3, Crysis 2, lord of the rings war in the north, x com enemy unknown, civilization 5, vindictus, league of legends, assasins creed 3 and an FF12 ps2 emulator. ALL OF EM RAN AT THE SAME TIME WITH GOOD (55+) FPS WITHOUT SLOWING THE COMPUTER DOWN H0LY SH%T!!! another test was extracting 6 separate 5 gigabyte files on winrar which actuallly stressed out the processor quite a bit. i'm having too much fun with this processor, i keep trying to find new ways to push this bad boy lol.

Pros: lots of storage cheap when i got it. good while it lasted (used it around 12 times died on the 12th time)

Cons: cheap not too fast no life longevity

Overall Review: i barely used it to back up some important data but now its dead along with all the data. should probably wait until solid state drives's storage capacity increases to a point where it replaces mechanical drives.