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Hi, I am building my first desktop and to make sure I don't get problematic hardware I am reading through the neweggs.com customer reviews for all the parts I am considering. Is this advisable, or is the negative review too skewed toward inexperienced builders & most people who are happy with their product don't bother to write a review rating(I always compare # of eggs and % of 1 egg reviews for products) for the review to be useful?

People that had a negative experience with a product are more likely to go back online and post a review compared to someone who had a positive experience with a product.

Don't just go by newegg reviews, research the product on google...

You need to ask yourself "How likely is it that this issue was user error?" when reading negative reviews. Newegg reviews are a helpful guideline, but I would not take them as the final word.

Motherboards always have a 20% poor review experience even for the best.

However, as ish said bad experiences merit bad reviews whereas many see writing reviews as a waste of time. If NewEgg made their total shipments available to view data on, you would think differently about many things.

I usually review the four star ratings on a product. They are statistically the most honest. I also like to sort reviews based on helpfulness as it filters much of the "DOA" nonsense ( those are useless reviews and I always ignore them.)

Not to sounds trite, but it helps to read the low score reviews. For example, BR-ROM and writers...a lot of low score reviews are because OEM units don't come with software to play BR discs, but they are OEM so don't come with any software and aren't listed as coming with software so low scores for that reason are pure user error.

Yes, as I noted you need to evaluate the negative reviews through a "user error" filter. If the negative review is because of something that is most likely *not* user error, then give it more weight. For example, I was looking at eSATA brackets the other day. One of them had several negative reviews that said "cable is too short to reach my motherboard's SATA ports". Well, that's a design flaw; the cables should be long enough to reach all the way to the lower front corner of the motherboard, since that's where most motherboards put their SATA ports; and if they're long enough to reach there, then they ought to be long enough to reach *any* spot where a sane motherboard designer would put the SATA ports.

Newegg's (and Amazon's) reviews can be somewhat useful - you just need to ignore the "egg rating" and simply read what reviewers say... For example, some people immediately leave negative score when they receive the DOA product or when the product fails during the warranty period - I simply ignore such reviews (any product has a chance of being defective) unless there's a significant amount of such reviews. I also do the same when people complain about customer support, as I already know which company's customer support is bad and which company's customer support is good. Also, sometimes manufacturers may release a "bad" firmware, which they may fix in future - if the manufacturer already fixed the issues with new firmware the "negative" reviews from people who had issues with old firmware become absolutely useless. And so on. Just use some common sense to determine which reviews are useful and which ones aren't

I put zero stock in customer reviews. Between shills, trolls, and incompetence.... I check review sites. If they don't send their stuff off to be reviewed, its not worth it to me.

That being said, if its non-tech stuff, I'll always read consumer reports and the comments there.

JohnC wrote:

For example, some people immediately leave negative score when they receive the DOA product or when the product fails during the warranty period - I simply ignore such reviews (any product has a chance of being defective) unless there's a significant amount of such reviews.

On the flip side of that there can be products with good user reviews that will eventually prove to be unreliable, simply because the product is too new to have had many failures yet.

I bought a Viewsonic monitor on newegg a few years back and when I bought it there were almost no negative reviews (the monitor had only been released a couple months prior). After less than a year that monitor spit out some smoke and died, and I went back to check out the newegg reviews for it. By that point the monitor had racked up a large amount of 1-egg ratings due to failures exactly like the one I had experienced.

I like to use them to try and assess the level of dead on arrival deliveries. Apart from that, you have to be careful to separate out the people who obviously know what they are talking about from those who don't; this isn't usually as difficult as it might seem.