Guys, I know monarch in the past has been a great place to purchase from, but I would stay away from them for a while. I don't know what happened, change in management, ownership, outgrew their capacity, etc., etc., but they have been really poor lately.
I recently purchased an OCZ 700Watt Gamestream Powersupply from them. Great price, I have to admit, best I could find even, so I decided to give them a chance even after the other posts in here about their site going "south"... Well, it was a fiasco. I can legitimately see their point of view for part of the problem (for whatever reason, when they tried to send me an email, a bounce would get back to them even though I received the email... doesn't make a lot of sense unless either my email carrier was specifically bouncing their IP range, but also still allowing the email to go through or their email system was doing something itself, or it was a bunch of crap...)
Anyway it took about 6 emails back and forth to them with me replying to emails that I received from them stating the fact that I was getting their emails (how else could I reply to them?), and that it really was my email address. Long story short, what should have been fixed in a 20 second phone call had to be done by email for some reason, as I was specifically told that this issue had to be resolved over email, which doesn't make any sense since the whole problem was that EMAIL DIDN'T WORK, so how could we fix a problem with email USING email?
Anyway, about 2 weeks of working on that problem, the power supply ships out. I open up the box and the OCZ power supply itself is bubble wrapped in a FedEx box. I mean the actual power supply, no original OCZ box, no UPC seal, no manual, no power cord, just the power supply. It was basically an "open box" item. No where on the site was this stated, or in any description of the item. Now I know that monarch does supply testing of items like doing the 24 hour burn-in on a motherboard/CPU combo, and such, but no where was this mentioned that they would do this to the power supply.
I don't know anymore, maybe they simply tested the supply to see that it was in working order before shipping out, but you would think they would place it back in the original box with all its parts. Heck, I don't really care about the power cord, I have about 50 of them laying around. I DO care about not having the UPC code and manual, since those are the proof of purchase things used for warrentys and rebates (if any apply).
So that was my most recent experience, and it just happened during the month of October. Go look at their reseller ratings for the last 6 months, they have seriously gone down a LOT. Again, I don't know what happened to them. They use to be one of my favorite sites to use and recommend. I think I sent about 20 or 30 people their way for bare-bones and full custom PC builds (these are people who didn't like to actually build it themselves, but still wanted to be able to select exactly each and every part in the system).
Sorry if this is a thread hijack, but I think it needs to be stated.