Posts in Category: uncategorized

Headphones Buying Guide

If you’ve spent more than five minutes checking headphones online, you’ve probably realised a few things:

  1. There’s thousands of different headphones.
  2. There’s thousands of different headphones with different properties and use cases.
  3. There’s thousands of different headphones with different properties and use cases, all within your budget.
  4. So you’ve furrowed your brow, opted out of the stress, and foisted this job to your future self (your limited spare time is better spent in nobler pursuits—like searching through your Netflix or Steam backlog).

All the headphones I’ve purchased have been for different uses, and each one has come with pros and cons. There’s a lot to consider, and hopefully this guide will help make the decision easier. Keep in mind that the following is in general terms. You may find a specific pair of headphones that behaves unexpectedly or as if it had different properties, and that’s fine. But this should match at least 90% of standard headphones on the market.

If you just want to get some recommendations for headphones based on different use cases and budgets, you can skip down to the section titled,”Which headphones should I buy?”

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Newegg’s Cyber Monday 2017 Deals – Cases

CyberMondayNewegg2017

Newegg’s 2017 Cyber Monday Case deals! Elementary, my dear Watson? No, not even Sherlock Holmes’ Casebook has a collection as fine as this! Small cases, big cases, cases as big as a house. Cases with windows, cases with doors, cases with 500 LEDs. All you have to do now is pick one with you preferred colour scheme.

Please note: The best deals are dependent on rebates. Such rebates are reliable, but only if you follow the instructions exactly and submit everything on time, so better be careful!

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What Are CPU and GPU Computer Bottlenecks? How Do You Detect Them?

“Bottleneck” is a term used to describe one component of a system that holds back the rest of the system from reaching its full potential.

Bottlenecks can be extremely detrimental to productivity. A lot of the time, businesses who have applications with bottlenecks in them will see it heavily affecting their system. This is usually solved by going to a Chicago software company to improve their application but what if the problem isn’t down to the software and instead is the fault of the CPU or GPU? Often when trying to diagnose an issue with a PC’s performance, we will eventually reach the topic of bottlenecking. This is especially common when it comes to maximizing performance in a PC game, where either the CPU or the graphics card may “bottleneck” the system, holding it back from achieving its potential in terms of framerate.

So, what exactly are these bottlenecks? And how do you determine if your PC is suffering from a bottlenecking component?

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A Tale of Logical Increments

Greetings, traveler. Sit ye down, have a cup of dark coffee, and hearken to my tale.

I have enjoyed tinkering with technology for as long as I can remember. I roasted my first PC at the age of 12, by playing around with the PSU switch. During my university stay, I assembled several computers for both myself and for my friends, since none of them really cared much about technology: They just wanted to play. 

In the early months of 2010, I noticed that many people had a problem getting specific builds for specific budgets. While it is easy to find an answer to “What is the best CPU for $200?” it is not as easy to get “The best build for $800.”

Many people came to /g/ for advice, and I started collecting sample builds from various “build advice” threads. After a few months, it was clear that some items were much more likely to be suggested than others, and some advice (e.g. get a quality PSU) was constantly repeated to people new to PC buying and assembly. I thought it would be nice if /g/’s advice could be compiled into a simple source, so that people could get as much info as needed (for a novice), without having to wait for a nice person to make a build and give advice. This was what prompted me to compile the Logical Increments PC buying guide.

The guide has a list of PC builds, each with a descriptive name, ranging in price from less than USD$300 to over USD$2000. Each tier is slightly better than the one before it, either by having more powerful components, or higher quality components. There is also a list of infoboxes, describing some aspects of each component that you should watch out for when making a purchasing decision. The components selection and advice are compiled from /g/, and from PC-related websites and articles.

/g/’s advice proved to be of extremely high quality, and as a result, the guide received nearly 2 million views, and continues to get several thousand views every month. It is also featured in several websites as a “sticky” for users to refer to, since it answers many questions that novices may ask. /g/ as a whole is knowledgeable, intelligent, resourceful, well-read, and often quite helpful.

Over the last two years, the number of tiers has increased, and the infoboxes increased too. The guide is in .png form, and cannot exceed 5000 pixels, leading to space constraints. An image needs to be hosted, and photobucket has a long URL, and tinyURL was banned on /g/. A .png cannot have links, nor can it have collapsible items. With more requests for more things, it is inevitable that one day the guide moves to a proper site. An exceedingly nice gentleman who wishes to be known as Orion has shouldered the burden of creating the site (design, hosting, testing etc, were all done by him), and we are now ready to transition to a proper website, instead of one static image.

So please do take a moment to let us know if the new layout is to your liking, and if it is not, then tell us how we can improve it. If there are any features you like, let us know too. It is our hope to take all the elements that made the guide good, and expand them further, while still having an easy-to-remember URL.

Thanks for reading!

– The Falcon

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