I'm still having great luck with mine! And I have not been taking it easy on the ESC either, I have been running about 12-15 packs a week through it since I have had it and only had the fan blades break ( I ended up removing the complete fan assembly ). Thats weird that yours had no topend, deffinitly somethings up with it, on the stock settings it made my 1700kv run as fast or a little faster than the Tekin R8 with a 2050kv but alot smoother. I bought a spare Orion just in case I had some failures but it's looking like it will be sitting in the box for awhile.