Joined on 11/19/07
Nice cooler for my GTX470's
Pros: If you get it at the $99.99 price then it's a really great deal. dropped my idle temp of my dual MSI GTX470's (non-oc) over 40 degrees at idle and about 25 at full load. Seriously, card 1 ran idle at about 70C. I saw many other people claiming theirs ran in the high 30's or 40's but I've never had a nVidia card run that cool, ever. Not even at idle. But with this cooling system, I dropped from the mid 70's to the low 30's At 100% load on both cards, they get up to about 45c. a HUGE difference in the amount of heat coming out of my machine. I have a Corsair T800 case so I had plenty of room to mount both radiators on the top vent. Unit runs very quiet, I can barely hear it even with full load.
Cons: Install may be tricky for novice builder. Having worked in the IT field for years and being a nerd in general, I didn't really have any issues with the install. Some people complained it was hard to mount the outer shell with the heat sync on it to the card due to the radiator and hoses being pre-connected (for obvious reasons). But having dealt with this in the past when I installed my Corsair H80 CPU cooler, I was sort of prepared for this. It is time consuming but it is not difficult if you follow the instructions and don't try to go move too fast.
Overall Review: Seems a little pricey if you pay the full $169.99 for this, but if you get the sale price then I think it's a great deal, especially for gamers and overclockers. Install can be tricky but I found that having a nice flat, clear work area and waiting the appropriate time for the heat sync glue to dry will make things a LOT easier. Planning ahead, I had almost no issue mounting the outer shell to the card once the heat syncs were dry. If you get anxious and don't wait the required hour dry time, you will probably knock a couple of them of trying to put it together. Fully dry they stay on nice and firm and won't pop off if you bump them.
Decent NAS for the price.
Pros: Purchased to store large video files on the network as opposed to my PC. Tried this because someone recommended. Unit was fairly easy to setup and get working. Simple web interface for novice users. The external USB port is a nice feature as well. I heard complaints about transfer rates but I have a gigabit network at home and found them to be pretty acceptable. I moved 90gb to the unit in about 35 mins. I also have a dual band HD wifi setup which I highly recommend if you move a lot of data and need to be wireless. The USB port does not allow traditional uploading of data via the USB port on your pc. You MUST\ move your data over the network. However it does support gigabit so if your network is gigabit (mine is) it goes pretty fast.
Cons: Plugging a USB drive into the external port does expand your storage, however I have only been able to read the drive, not write to it. I can only write to the internal storage. I get an error every time I try to write even after trying several drives. The unit offers no options or drive utilities for the external drive so instead of transferring all my movies to the internal drive, I copied them to the USB drive (since it's read only when attached) and can add keep free space on the internal drive. I'm not sure what the story is regarding write access on the USB port . I have to call WD to get an answer I suppose since the unit comes with very little documentation and the integrated help is somewhat weak. I couldn't even find much on the WD web site regarding these specific models I mentioned the simple web interface. But I feel it's a little too simple and lacks some extra security features. I feel it should offer an advanced settings for users who know what they are doing and need a little more security.
Overall Review: That being said, it's a pretty good deal for fast network storage. For another $30 you can get a 3TB unit. I do wish it offered some advanced settings and more options for that external USB attached drive so you can write instead of read only.
Great price for a large drive but...
Pros: This is a great price on a large SSD drive. Not the fastest out there but one of the fastest of it's class.
Cons: Was supposed to be refurbished but when I received it, it already had several partitions along with a Windows 10 installation on it, which tells me it's not really refurbished, it's just used and probably wasn't tested.
Overall Review: Seeing as the unit works, I guess I shouldn't really complain for the price. I ran diags on it and it passed everything but I would have been more comfortable if it had actually been tested and packaged properly instead of just put in an ill fitting plastic laptop SODIMM package and scotch taped. Otherwise it's been working fine.
Functional but has some issues.
Pros: One of the faster eSATA RAID card I tested with my ProBox 4 bay external raid box. Supports eSATA replication out of the box*.
Cons: One of the slowest posting cards I have ever worked with. Takes full 30 seconds just to post and detect the drive array. *Detected all 3 of my WD 3gb green drives out of the box, but after a firmware update, would only see 2 drives no matter which bays they were in.
Overall Review: I needed a bunch of extra storage for archiving very large files so I opted for the 4-bay RaidBox and installed 3 drives, leaving room for some future expansion. My Asus Sabertooth x79 has built in eSATA but the transfer rates were abysmal - around 20mb/s. tried a couple other cards (including the one made by the RaidBox people) and was able to get it up to about 40mb/s but that wasn't good enough. I finally got to the RocketRaid controller and it worked quite well, providing transfer rates up to 180mb/s. Great! But on post, this thing shows firmware from 2010 and the post time was a full 30 seconds so I thought a firmware update may be in order. I downloaded the v13 firmware from their web site and after flashing it, it did nothing for the post time, and although the post screen showed a 2015 date, the card was now only seeing 2 drives in the ProBox instead of 4.Not even windows would see all the drives with the drivers installed. Only two would be visible regardless which bays they were in and the flash utility did not backup the old rom. The MFR site only provided the latest firmware so I had to search over hell and high water to find V11 of the rom and hope it got me working again. It did but I was back to the 2010 firmware, however the older flash utility backed up the rom before flashing. Funny. Don't bother with phone support, they won't answer. You have to register your device and create an account on their web page to get support. You may get it but good luck with that. They eventually replied and said they would look into it. I don't expect them to.
Don't waste your time. Junk right out of the box.
Pros: Cheap - That's about it. I can't say anything good because it only turned on for 3 seconds then died.
Cons: Ignore the one egg rating, it's actually zero. This thing is basically a piece of garbage. While it looks like you get a lot out of the box, the reality of it is it's super cheap hardware. When I plugged in the AC adapter, it made a visible spark every time. The unit turned on for about for about 3 seconds then went blank and would do nothing but emit a single beep on subsequent power on's. I'm going to try and make NewEgg pay for shipping so at lease I'm not out that too.
Overall Review: Save yourself some time and spend the extra few bucks for something better. I didn't read the review before I purchased and really should have. Hopefully you're reading this before making yours.
Not the best value for the price.
Pros: Great LAN speeds. moves extremely large files (10-20GB) in just minutes to another machine on the LAN. Fairly quick and easy setup.
Cons: I feel there are more cons than pro's. 1) Menus are dreadfully slow after the last bios update, taking up to 2 mins to load a menu page. 2) Each time you save a setting, you have to wait 45 seconds for the router to reset itself. 3) Slow network connection on boot; takes windows 2-3 additional mins to connect to the network after pc boots, on ALL machines in the house. 4) Marginal WiFi speeds, even giving unstable connection errors from 8 feet away at times. 5K unusable from more than about 20' from the router. 5) Port forwarding does not work. BIOS update was supposed to fix this problem but I installed the latest BIOS and no luck yet. 6) Poor phone support; Called Hawking support several times to address some of these issues and all they were able to have me do was reset my router, forcing me to reconfigure it and pretty much wasting my time since I had already read all their support pages and did all that BEFORE I called. Every issue I called about I was told to reset the router, which did nothing. Beyond that they were zero help.
Overall Review: This router looks great on paper but the reality of it is that Hawking is aware of the issues this unit has and has done little to nothing to fix any of it.
Shipped completely different monitor than what I ordered.
I knew I was taking a chance ordering form the Newegg Marketplace as I've never had any luck purchasing anything that didn't come directly from Newegg and my fears were well founded. What I ordered was a refurbished Samsung 213T monitor, but what I got was basically whatever they had laying around. Opening the box, it looks like they just threw some old junky used monitor into a box with some bubble wrap. It wasn't the correct model, size or aspect ratio as what I ordered and certainly not the quality monitor I expected. Arrow was fairly quick to respond with a RMA number but when I inquired about if they had the actual monitor I ordered I could not get a response and kept getting the same form letter emailed back to me. Since the day I received the RMA I've been getting survey's from them asking how good their customer service is but I have yet to receive credit for the monitor I returned so I guess this is your response.