Thursday, September 6, 2007

Newegg reviews - Cooling solution edition

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid 90% of the people writing reviews of products at Newegg.com are.

For instance: Lately my PC has been driving me insane with this crazy rattling noise. After a little investigation, it appears to be the stock AMD cooling solution. The fan is clipped to a frame that is clipped to the heatsink, and it's just loose enough to vibrate when the PC is on, thus making a horrible racket.

So I went to Newegg and looked for a cheap replacement cooling solution. I found a decent Thermaltake fan/heatsink for around 20 bucks. It's a 20 dollar cooling solution, so any rational mind would realize that it's not meant to do much more than replace a stock cooling solution, or serve as a cooling solution for an OEM processor that came without a cooling solution.

Of course, the people writing reviews at Newegg don't seem to care about being rational. I read complaints that it didn't cool as well as Zalman cooling solutions 6x its price range, that it wasn't good for overclocking, and that it wasn't totally silent. People, it's a 20 dollar cooling solution. If you want those things, you're going to need to pony up the cash for them.

I have a feeling I'm going to be totally satisfied, because I know what I'm buying. All I need is a cooler that doesn't rattle. This heatsink/fan combo has rubberized washers to prevent fan vibration. That's all I want.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drop 20 bucks on a video card from 1999 and complain that it won't run Bioshock.

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