Joined on 10/26/12
Nvidia Knows what they're doing
Pros: The first thing you will notice about this tablet out of the box is how perfectly sized it is to hold in one hand and the overall good feel of it. The tablet stays cool, is very powerful, and does everything Nvidia is advertising as well as they advertise it. Half-Life 2 plays great in Full HD natively on the tablet with really smooth real-time refractions and minimal stutters. Portal is a little smoother still because of the relatively small areas being loaded at a time. Nvidia's Gamestream works great from a PC on the same network and still really well from one over the internet. Most surprising to me though was how smoothly games play from their GRID server. Nvidia's GRID is only in BETA so far, but it works very smooth even with roughly 60ms latency. I would have to rate GRID 4.5/5 right now and it is full of potential. Also great for watching Youtube videos.
Cons: Accessories are almost non-available at launch. It does get somewhat warm when playing heavy games like HL2, but not uncomfortably so (you probably won't be holding it while playing these games anyway). No 32GB version without LTE. Fallout 3 doesn't play natively on Android. Also, most games on it are not mapped to be used properly with a mouse and keyboard. I hope they add that in a future update to HL2 and Portal, but it's no really big deal.
Overall Review: I will start by saying that I've never considered buying any tablet before, but I jumped on this as soon as it was released. All together you will not find a better tablet for $300. I bought mine through Best Buy because I work there and I still don't have the Shield wireless controller yet, but it works equally well with a wired Xbox 360 controller hooked up through USB OTG. I would really like to see more PC games ported to Android for native compatibility like TF2 and Fallout 3.
Died in a month
Pros: Worked well for a while, I'm sure not all of them fail.
Cons: I contacted ASRock about an LED that remained on and they never responded. Also the board stopped powering on after about a month. First it had trouble powering on and I had to use the internal power button, the next day I could just not get it to power on at all.
Overall Review: I have been pretty unsatisfied with ASRock's customer service because of them not responding to me the first time. I have since contacted them about this but am still awaiting a response. Also believe me when I say that I have tried everything to turn this motherboard on: different PSU, disconnecting everything, switching BIOS's, removing the CMOS battery, using different memory, but it won't even start turning the fans.
One of the best cases for the money
Pros: Better construction quality than others at this price point. USB 3.0 front panel header has a 2.0 runoff in case your motherboard doesn't have a 3.0 Header. Good holes for cable management. Simple but cool look. Excellent drive mounting solution, which is tool-less for 3.5" drives. The included fan has a molex plug as well as a 3 pin fan plug. The power button has a nice rubberized feel to it as well as the rest of the side of the front panel. Good space for fan and radiator mounting. Really bright LEDs.
Cons: Really bright LEDs. The front panel i/o board blocks the top 5.25" drive panel and the bottom 5.25" slot is only designed for 3.5" drives, but no 5.25" to 3.5" front panel adapter is included. Not available with a window. The hole at the top for the 4/8 pin CPU connector should be moved up a little for larger boards. And the main reason that I took off an egg from this review is the one time use expansion slot covers that have to be broken off.
Overall Review: This case was $30 and free shipping when I bought it as a cheap but cool looking case. Overall an excellent case for someone with a tight budget that wants it to look cool, have good construction, and be easy to work in.
Excellent cooler replacement for stock fan.
Pros: Works very well; it took my load temps from 90C load and 50C idle to 60C load and 35C idle. Was fairly easy to install as a replacement for my XFX stock fan on my Radeon HD 6950 1GB, works very well, plugs right into the card, large heatsink, quiet fans, has more than enough included heatsinks for all of the RAM and VRM modules. Includes thermal paste I didn't use.
Cons: Turns a dual slot card into a triple slot card. The screw holes on the elongated VRM heatsink did not line up with the holes on the board, but were luckily far enough apart to go through one hole and be screw-ed through the open part at the bottom near the PCI-e bus.
Overall Review: I have been using my 6950 for mining for a little while now and I feel much better now that the temps at a constant 99% load are about 60C. I had to hyphenate screw-ed because Newegg listed the regularly spelled word as inappropriate. Get it together Newegg.
Can't compete with Samsung these days.
Pros: This thing is extremely fast. Typical speeds are around 550MB/s sequential read and around 90,000 IOPS. When I activated Samsung's RAPID technology with this I was getting 1150MB/s sequential read and 230,000 IOPS in crystal disk mark. My computer boots faster than my television, which I am using as a monitor. Also getting a 250GB SSD for ~$180 is awesome.
Cons: The only con is that it doesn't come with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter. This actually makes sense though because most cases these days have drive bays that will work with both sizes, but it would be nice to have.
Overall Review: I didn't buy this through Newegg because I got a discount buying it from Best Buy, but now I wish I had since they had the 15% off coupon and now the shell shocker. There really is no competition for this drive anywhere and no better place to buy it than Newegg.
Just what I would expect from Intel.
Pros: Straightforward installation, great price for mSATA drive (I got the 120GB version at $120), and really good speeds in my Acer Aspire M5-581T. For anyone who's curious it gets an 8.1 in WEI.
Cons: Doesn't include mounting screw(s)
Overall Review: For anyone trying to use their recovery media to change drives in your laptop please read this. I started by removing the hard drive so it would not possibly install to that, then installed the mSATA SSD and inserted my USB recovery dive. When in UEFI mode it wouldn't boot into the USB, it would just say "NO BOOTABLE MEDIUM DETECTED." So I put it in legacy BIOS mode and it booted fine from the USB and I went through the recovery process. When finished I was unable to boot from the SSD. In the end I figured out I needed to boot into UEFI mode with F12 boot select enabled and to mash the F12 key before it told me there was no boot media so I could select the USB and boot from it. After that everything went as expected.