Good hardware surprises any of you have had?

[Judaeus Apella]

Have any of you recently within the past 6 months or so, taken a chance on a peice of hardware you didn't know much about, didn't hear great things about, or maybe because of a lack of, inconclusive, average or below average, or conflicting reviews, and it turned out to be great? It can be anything. It doesn't matter. RAM, CPU, hard drive, video card, mother board, a cooler for the last 5, a fan, mouse, keyboard, case, screen, sound card, speakers, hardware accessories, wiring, mod kits, etc. It could even be something you thought would probably just turn out to be a gimick. Why did it turn out to be such a great product?

[nn_step]

I got this multimeter as a gift about 2 years ago and if you plug the connectors for Current and switch it to Diode test, you can use it like a Tazer :D

[quicksilverXP]

I bought a Gigabyte S3 knowing that it wasn't the DS3 because I wasn't planning to overclock at all. I figure since I'm in grad school there'd be no point in tinkering around with overclocking... so I didn't bother with the DS3. I bought the S3 knowing that no one had it yet and no one would buy it since you can get a DS3 for like 20 dollars more.

Now I have my S3 at 500x7 with an E6400... there's always room for overclocking.

[SparkyJJO]

I got this multimeter as a gift about 2 years ago and if you plug the connectors for Current and switch it to Diode test, you can use it like a Tazer :D
LOL

I bought a basic low-end gigabyte board for a cheap customer PC and it had nice rubycon capacitors all over it. I won't have to worry about bad caps with that board :)