- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
Gamer PC Monitor Apple Cinema Display
With AMD, you can use three smaller 22″ monitors to get a gamers view, but for us, a single bigger 27″ or even 30″ display is easier to look at and it would be nice if they were 3-D capable since heck why not. They are huge at 2560×1440 lines As Tom’s Hardware explains, there…
-
Gamer PC Speakers not really needed
Normally we don’t get super fancy speakers as most of our work is actually going to be gaming with headphones and it is hard to crank things, so we will probably stick with a simple 2.1 system like the JBL Creative systems that we already have. If you do want a great system, it’s probably…
-
Gamer PC Headphones Corsair Vengeance 1500
Gaming headsets are really important as they help you figure out where people are shooting at you by sound. Tom’s Hardware had a roundup Corsair Vengence 1500. I’m still looking through those, but Tom’s Hardware had a good overview. They like the Corsair Vengence 1500 and say the virtual 7.1 sound is actually pretty good which is…
-
Gamer PC Sound Card isn't needed
The main question is, do you really need a dedicated sound card. Depends on the motherboard you’ve selected. With the ASUS P8Z77-V (a PC Magazine Editors Choice), you get onboard full 7 channel sound including an optical SP/DIF output and analog RCA jacks, so no need for this
-
Gamer PC Power Supply Kingwin LZP-1000 Platinum
Well power supplies don’t seem to have changed much. People are still using ATX connectors and so forth. In fact I have a relatively quiet 750W ATX power supplly around somewhere from five years ago and it seems like it should work. But Tom’s Hardware and SilentPCReview.com did a overview of the issues there which are…
-
Gamer PC Cases NZXT Switch 810
The biggest issue with cases is having something that is small but big enough to work in. And if you are going to liquid cooling, something that can actually handle a huge radiator. Tom’s Hardware did a great review of full sized ATX cases that are actually big enough to put a three fan radiator…
-
Speck See Thru for the MacBook Air
I absolutely adore this case. Expensive at $50 but comes with a one year warranty if you buy from an authorized reseller. I didn’t and it cracked and regret it, but it really does protect the finish of your MacBook Air. It is very tight and cracks easily on impact so beware, but it is…
-
Gamer PC Cooling with Swiftech Edge H200-320 or even an Puget Systems Aquarium with Noctua NH-D14
I’ve always wanted to build a watercooled case. A few years ago, I wanted to build a silent PC and loved silentpcreview.com, but now with water cooling becoming much more turnkey, it makes some sense to go all water cooled and make your machine silent overclockable. Tom’s Hardware has a pretty good guide, but the…
-
Gamer PC Memory with Mushkin Redline 993997 DDR3-2133 or G.Skill F3-2400
Time once again to learn the in’s and out’s of memory which right now is SDRAM DDR3, but the basic facts are that you can overclock memory a little and in most benchmarks, once you go from vanilla DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2133, you have had a huge improvement in performance at a relatively low cost. If…
-
USB Flash Keys
These things just keep getting cheaper and smaller. So much so that I keep losing them, I’ve bought of series of fast USB 3.0 drives (even though I don’t have any computer with USB 3.0 :-), but the main thing I’m finding isn’t speed, it is not losing the darn things. The plastic cases are…
-
Gamer PC Storage Samsung 830 256GB x 2 soon to be 840
Well this is a huge area encompassing both the system ram and also the disk. Right now it feels like going solid state on everything is the way to go, so we are thinking just get a 500GB SSD or maybe a pair and put the rest of the stuff on a NAS somewhere. I…
-
Gamer PC Keyboards with Razer Black Widow Ultimate
Well, the world is turning back a little. For the true gamer, you can either get a keyboard full of extra keys for macros or go old school and get mechanical keys. These are the old IBM Selectric or original IBM PC keyboards (I wish I kept mine). They go clack, clack, but they feel…
-
MacBook microphone not working
OK, so discovered that my microphone wasn’t working. What’s the diagnostic procedure. Well it comes down to a bunch of simple things to try: Go to System Preference/Sound make make sure the internal microphone is selected and not muted Reboot the machine and hold down the four keys Option-Command-P-R to reset the PRAM configuration information…
-
Gamer PC GPU selection nVidia GTX-670 as ASUS GTX670-DC2T-2GD5 or Gigabyte N670OC-2GD
There are lots of them out there but some quick review at Tom’s Hardware. The unit you get depends a little bit on what you want to do. The big decision is whether to go water cooled or not. If you do then a pair of PNYs (as described by overclocker.com)will really help make a…
-
Gamer PC motherboards ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe or ASUS Maximus GENE Micro ATX Z77 for water cooled
Well the big news is that you fit this monster Core i7-3770K in just a tiny motherboard based on the Z77 or you can a big board with room for 4 graphics processors all based on the same firmware. The summary is the size of the board depends on how many graphics cards you will…
-
Gamer PC CPU is the Intel Core i5-3570K as best value
The other big trend at the recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF) are small computers, they are doing and as Tom’s Hardware’s Buying Guide notes. The net is that you want a good tradeoff, it is to get the Core i5-3570K for $225 which is only 100Mhz slower than the Core i7-3770K. You don’t get the…
-
Water purifiers
Alex says my water filter (MSR Miniworks) is too slow at 1Q per minute and that my Steripen Adventurer (thanks Rennie!) is broken with a dead wetness sensor. Both are sad things, so off to find what the latest gizmo’s people have cooked up:
-
Synology reloaded
Well, I finally got the DroboPro stabilized with the data recovered. Because I’ve become paranoid, I’ve also got Crashstation running nonstop (glad Comcast has suspended their 250GB/month limit) so I have an offsite backup. For good measure I’m using my old Time Capsuls (3 x 1TG of them) to get the most important data backed…
-
Fit-PC2i
Wow, I now have a wonderful tiny box which is the Fit-PC2i. I haven’t run a non-Mac machine in something like 4 years and it is so embarassing. Here are some notes to use it: There is no manual included in the box, so you have to go online This comes without an SSD. you…
-
Gamer PC and fanless PC
Well since I’m buying all this equipment and we’ve settled on Apple for most of our computing needs, there are still that aren’t being met. First is the really small (think AppleTV size) box that is really an open PC with Linux so I can learn that development world and then the massive Gamer PC…
-
Sharpening images, cleaning noise and photo workflow updates
Well the standard trick for sharpening photos is the wonderfully named unsharp mask (ugh what a name), but there have been better approaches. Adobe Photoshop implements something called Smart Sharpen and there are lots of papers on the topic. For a while I used FocusMagic but they don’t have version for the Intel Mac. So…
-
AVI Hacking
Right now I’m trying to get most of my videos as 1080p with DTS. Seems to me the highest quality. But this does mean transcoding on playback but with today’s fast processors, its not such a big deal. But there are still AVI containers around that are chopped up, so how do we get them…
-
Pax Prime and Gaming fever
Well got to go to Pax Prime. Man, I had no idea it was such a cool event so close to us. Anyway, need to go there from now on. The gaming section on the 4th floor of the convention center is terrific. Crowded though so you probably just have to get there early to…
-
Time Capsule early generation to MacBook and AppleTV at 5GHz
Not quite sure what model, but it is an old Time Capsule, I think 2nd generation, in any case, just beware that there is a strange bug with 7.6.1 firmware. If you want to do 5GHz mode, you need to set it to 802.11n (a compatible), if you set it to 802.11n only then the…
-
AT&T iPhone Unlock
Well this has gotten way easier. If you have an AT&T iPhone and it is off contract (e.g., two years since you bought it), here is how you get it unlocked so it will work with any carrier (eg T-Mobile or you can use it overseas with a different SIM): Apply to AT&T. This can…
-
Home Wifi
Well, it is great Apple is spending so much time on iPhone, iPads and maybe a little on MacBooks and AppleTV, but sadly, that leaves much of the promise of home networking in the dust. With Airport Extremes and Time Capsules kind of forgotten and a sea of not so good Wifi routers out there,…
-
Want to be scared about passwords?
Turns out there are plenty (according to Ars Technica) of password “recovery” tools out there. They use graphics cards to do the work. A good example is that with two graphics card, it takes 56 seconds to crack a random 8 character password! Wow, makes you really think about how passwords are being used particulary given…
-
Pretty cool things you can do with Dropbox
Or Skydrive or Google Drive. The main point is that it lets you easily stick things on your home computer, then an application on your home machine can watch it and do something, so for instance, there are application to run a web site from it, its a good place to put all your password…
-
Shoot 5K video
Gizmodo makes a pretty darn good point, it a dSLR can shoot 14 fps at 22MP, then you can use it to shoot short videos. As frame rates rise, maybe you get to the point where it won’t cost $30K to shoot a fast video…. This is a great example of how one market and intrude…
-
Top action movies
Don’t you ever wish, you could just take a list of top movies and then have the computer figure out how to get them the most inexpensive way. So here are the top action movies by IGN in reverse order Point Break Goldfinger Mr and Mrs Smith Top Gun Casino Royale Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocl Kill…