Here's my score:

AWA: 5.5
Verbal: 165
Quantitative: 165

I know it's not a perfect score but it's an honest living. And I got it with 2 months of preparation done alongside a full time job so the impressions might be helpful ... or not. Ignore it if you want. Here's how I prepared:

Writing:

I did it in the last two days. Mostly because I'm very confident in my writing and knowledge on many topics. I found the essays in Manhattan 5lb book to be too complicated and 'meta' almost to the point of sounding edgy. Those essays were talking more about the prompt statement instead of the issue itself. I found GregMat's "template" about writing essay as an introduction that doesn't break-down the topic, followed by 2-3 paragraphs and a boring, bland conclusion that acknowledges the other side to be pretty damn good. I wrote 3 essays for practice on the last day. Got one spelling wrong on the test day that haunts me (deincentivize instead of disincentivize) and wrote an essay that was some 800 words long and found a lot of stupid spelling and grammatical errors in last minute overview.

Verbal:

I learned all of Magoosh's flashcards (finished 5 times over). Learned all of GregMat's vocabulary words. Most importantly, I made a stupid mnemonics and rhyme book of my own with some 1500 words with puns, vulgar jokes, and quotes to remember them with. I don't normally use ChatGPT but it wrote a few funny jokes with colorful vocabulary for me; I will always remember the story about how "Demure Debby" won the twerking competition.

I did all of 5lb book's reading passages and they were meh. The passages themselves were great but I disagreed with the book in a lot of the reasoning in selection of the options. But the passages in the actual test were VERY similar to the 5lb book's.

The first section was easy. The vocabulary was not hard, the passages gave straight-forward answers to the questions. And the options in reading comprehension were usually very easy to rule out.

The second section was infuriating. The passages were still easy, but the sentence completion was littered with florid vocabulary I had never seen in my life. Even so, the sentence structures were not complicated and I knew what the meaning of the word that fit a blank was supposed to be. It's just that I didn't recognize the words in the options. Pretty sure I got a lot of sentence completion wrong in the second section.

Quant:

I prepared with the 5lb book and the "Tested Tutor" videos. I watched GregMat videos only for the ultra-hard questions but those are irrelevant to the GRE. The 5lb book has some questions with impossible difficulty levels too for which you almost need to remember how to solve that particular question. Those are stupid. You should ignore them. But whatever people say, my test had A LOT of questions that were almost straight out of the 5lb book with just slight variations.

The first section, here too, was easy. Save for maybe one or two, I could glide through all questions without breaking a sweat. I did get a lot of annoying data interpretation questions but those were simple "find the percentage difference" types. They're only annoying due to the scrolling between the question statement and the figure.

The second section was also surprisingly easy. Like, I could sense that the difficulty had been ramped up but I could see through the tricks and traps that are almost always in the question statement relying on you not reading it right. Again, my second section had a lot of data interpretation, and some distribution. There were even some of those silly, "find the median" questions in which a simple 10 number list was given that wasn't arranged ascendingly. There was a lot of trigonometry, all with comparison type questions. Some simple percentages and double-intersection Venn Diagrams. But in no section did I encounter a single probability or combinations question.

So in my experience, GregMat is great for both writing and verbal. The Tested Tutor will help a lot with quantitative concepts. You should definitely do ETS' preptests and Princeton Review's preptests too that are almost exactly same as ETS. But the 5lb book is not something to avoid like the plague as many tutors suggest. It's a great book that's good for both verbal and quant and it hasn't aged out. And making *your own* vocabulary puns and sentences in a document you can easily go over any time helps a lot.