Which "cheap" component absolutely blew you away?

PerfectBlue97

Have you ever brought something that was cheap, or budget, but which had such a high level of quality and\or performance that it could outdo a premium product costing significantly more?

Like buying some Chinese RGB fans off of ebay that were silent and looked fantastic, or buying a budget gaming mouse that responded like a £100 one?

Come on, share your stories.

AndyMan2000

I will not be the first or last to say this. The Intel Q6600. It was the same price as the flagship dual core at the time and about £250 cheaper than the next model up from it. Intel deliberately dropped the price on it to destroy AMD, and it 100% worked.

Many years later AMD pull the same trick on Intel with it's 8 core ryzen. Probably blew a huge sales hole in intels enthusiast platform.

mikeysthoughts

Picked up a Raspberry Pi mkII at the same time that Nintendo released their NES and SNES mini consoles. 35 quid for something that did far more (N64, Megadrive, SNES, etc.) vs 100-quid plus for the Nintendo stuff.

techquest

You bet it did, but as they say what goes around comes around.