We are closing the books on our busiest year at NeweggBusiness. In doing so, we would like to take a moment to highlight some of the best performing SKUs of 2014. Each of these items are best sellers among their categories, thanks to competitive pricing and good, old-fashioned quality engineering. We take pride in delivering the products with the right specs and the right price. Here’s a look at six leading items of 2014.
Category: Notebooks
Users saw the value this 15.6-inch Lenovo notebook, with its sub-$400 price point and very respectable computing specifications. Powered by a 2.16 GHz Intel Celeron, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, and 500 GB of HDD storage, it more than suffices for basic production work—on and offline. Discounted prices in the fourth quarter helped this Lenovo notebook claim the lead in its category, edging out the HP 250 G2 as the notebooks best-seller.
Category: CPU
The Intel Core i7-4790K dominated its class, capturing nearly 15 percent of the category market share. The CPU is was the go-to for users looking to upgrade upper-mainstream desktop PCs, the last stop before the next generation of Intel chips that arrived on the market in August, the much-awaited Intel Haswell-E model.
Category: Monitors
One of the most versatile monitors on the market, the Acer G6 series has been around for nearly three years already. It remains in the top spot in the monitor category thanks to its slim profile and price tag—the 24-inch model saw prices well below $200 for the better part of 2014. NeweggBusiness users rated this model 4 eggs or better on 89 percent of reviews. Solid numbers, but it barely edged out the Dell UltraSharp in annual sales totals.
Category: NAS
Synology dominated NAS sales this year, claiming eight of the top ten best-selling network storage units. The DS1513+ model sits at the top of the heap. Built for high-end consumer and small business use, it provides capabilities that were once cost-prohibitive for small business owners—namely expansive storage size thanks to five front-facing drive bays each capable of housing a 4 TB hard disk. Several NeweggBusiness users liked the software’s UI as well, noting ease of deployment and maintenance.
Category: SSD
Once Samsung released software to correct a read performance bug for the 840 EVO SSD in October, there was no looking back for this industry-wide number one selling SSD unit in 2014. We are even more excited about its successor, the 850 EVO, which utilizes 3D NAND technology. Surely the SSD category will be one to watch in 2015, as prices continue to fall as new technology catches on.
Category: Desktop RAM
Frequent discounts to an already low per-GB price point (8 GB for under $90) made the Kingston HyperX Fury the top RAM seller this year. With a 5 egg rating frequency of 96 percent, nearly all users commented along the lines of “it just works,” which is precisely what you want RAM to do.
Category: HDD
Big storage, small price tag, deep discounts—these factors propelled Samsung’s D3 Station to the top of the HDD category in 2014. The unit houses a Seagate 4 TB external drive, and reviews were mixed for this model. Hard drives tend to work perfectly until they do not work at all. Thankfully for these instances, users can utilize the 3 year warranty on these products.
The 4790k sold more than the FX-8350?
Hi Stephen, the AMD FX-8350 actually placed 5th this year behind 4790k and three other Intels.