Off Topic Thread V2.0

Xenoronin

Gotta recommend the Gamecom 780 (replaced by the 788?). Had it for two years. Kinda miss the sound quality. The virtual surround sound was impressive for gaming. not the most comfortable or stylish though.
Currently have a pair of ATH-M50x matched with a modmic. Both are excellent, feel like i need an amp for the headphones. Max sound level is just normal listening level with them...

Headshot

Luck100 wrote: »

Which monitor is this?

samsung S34E790C

frozenfrozen

I have ath m50s with a tube amp / dac and they sound nice. must actually go find them haven't seen them in a few months

Xenoronin

Any recommendations on a good amp/dac combo?

justsomebloke

Xenoronin wrote: »

Gotta recommend the Gamecom 780 (replaced by the 788?). Had it for two years. Kinda miss the sound quality. The virtual surround sound was impressive for gaming. not the most comfortable or stylish though.
Currently have a pair of ATH-M50x matched with a modmic. Both are excellent, feel like i need an amp for the headphones. Max sound level is just normal listening level with them...

I have the 788s and find them very disappointing. Find the quality very sub par

frozenfrozen

Xenoronin wrote: »

Any recommendations on a good amp/dac combo?

I wouldn't have any clue really. Bought mine on a whim from massdrop, I'd go solid state rather than tube next time but other than that I'd say just go on http://www.head-fi.org/ and get something they say is ok for the price.

ED E

Xenoronin wrote: »

Any recommendations on a good amp/dac combo?

Fiio E10 is lovely, but if you want purely desktop use go for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EVWccVk-nM

twinsen

Sonics2k wrote: »

Nah, I'm running Witcher 3 and GTAV with a reference GTX 970 and an Asus ROG Swift at 1440p and 144hz. Very very rarely dip below 60 fps and tend to maintain 80fps or so.

The 970 doesn't get the credit it deserves after the 3.5gb fiasco

edit:
Sorry Digital, only had some DDR2 ram laying around the place sadly.

Bull****. GTX980 can barely pull average 40fps in witcher on 1440p resolution and ultra details. Even on mixed high and ultra there is no way gtx970 can do over 60fps

TheDoc

Do people who use amps etc. do so with just speakers, or people who use headphones?

I'm seeing SO many pics of peoples setups with amps and audio ****, with headphones going through them and i dont know whats going on

TheDoc

Gehad_JoyRider wrote: »

can any one recomend, a good pair of gaming head sets?

also i blame my girl friend she distracted me :mad:

As someone else mentioned, Siberia V2's the best I've used in terms of and over ear headset with a good clear mic.

I've had two pairs, going on eight years now. Really cant fault them enough, and the price is usually very attractive(last pair I bought were on sale for €50)

Kingston Hyper x clouds are getting some nice reviews and seem to be a up there.

Sennheiser do some nice sets in that range also, still have a pair(had them before Siberias) and plugged them in for the laugh last night in a raid. Still excellent quality and actually were a little lighter in terms of warmth(some heat at the moment)

papu

Gehad_JoyRider wrote: »

can any one recomend, a good pair of gaming head sets?

also i blame my girl friend she distracted me :mad:

I've sennheiser Hd280 pros still after 8 years , also have a pair of logitech UE9000's . i prefer the sennheisers.

vlad2009

I ordered myself some superlux 668b as they seem to get very positive reviews, and praise online. Will report when they arrive

Xenoronin

Only reason I'm wanting to get an amp is due to the lack of power from onboard sound. It can't drive my headphone speakers. Seems like a lot of the higher end headphones have the same issue due to the high impedance (resistance) of the headphones. You can also connect speakers into some of these to make use of the DAC (Digital to audio converter) and get better sound quality than onboard. I am learning a lot about this only today so my knowledge is a bit lacking but I can see why they are popular.

ED E

TheDoc wrote: »

Do people who use amps etc. do so with just speakers, or people who use headphones?

I'm seeing SO many pics of peoples setups with amps and audio ****, with headphones going through them and i dont know whats going on

The main reason for lots of people to get an AMP/DAC is due to high end headphones. If you've got some good cans theres a decent chance they'll be high impeadence and onboard cards just cant handle them well. For example my beyers are 300Ohms/channel. A basic pair of Panasonics that you pick up in HMV say will only be 20 or 30 Ohms.

Many good units will do both speakers and headphones. Mine has 3.5mm TRS on the front for headphones and co-ax/line out on the rear for monitors(speakers). That way you can use the same sound device for both (and turn one down to use the other).

frozenfrozen

Anyone know what I should do for a home server style yoke? I want to run plex, nzbget, sonarr, deluge, have lots of storage in zfs or brtfs, run a pfsense router, sophos utm, and any more of that kind of messing around but useful stuff, not really set on using all of that but I thought I'd show off my new vocab

Is it just a case of looking out for a not too old 2u rack server with 32+ gigs of ram and adding a couple of hbas, whacking some drives in a case with sas expander yokes then installing esxi and go from there?


I'd like to just buy a few 4tb hard drives and call it a day but the more I look into it you're not even meant to use hardware raid anymore and it's all bitrot and checksums out my ears.

would making my current pc into headed esxi with windows and then something with zfs and all the other stuff work? Then I could just pass through hbas and iscsi to it from windows?

Do any of the words I'm using even make sense? I hardly knew any of these words existed until recently

Danger781

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Anyone know what I should do for a home server style yoke? I want to run plex, nzbget, sonarr, deluge, have lots of storage in zfs or brtfs, run a pfsense router, sophos utm, and any more of that kind of messing around but useful stuff, not really set on using all of that but I thought I'd show off my new vocab

Is it just a case of looking out for a not too old 2u rack server with 32+ gigs of ram and adding a couple of hbas, whacking some drives in a case with sas expander yokes then installing esxi and go from there?


I'd like to just buy a few 4tb hard drives and call it a day but the more I look into it you're not even meant to use hardware raid anymore and it's all bitrot and checksums out my ears.

would making my current pc into headed esxi with windows and then something with zfs and all the other stuff work? Then I could just pass through hbas and iscsi to it from windows?

Do any of the words I'm using even make sense? I hardly knew any of these words existed until recently

Makes sense to me!

New to whole server world myself. Ended up going with the HP ProLiant Gen8 Microserver and have been documenting my progress and just general things I've learned in my blog. Just a few days ago I set up sonarr, couchpotato, plex and transmission for automated media sorting. I'm running unRAID 6.0 (http://lime-technology.com/) so I have Docker containers, VM, and NAS all in one.

I'll be willing to go into more detail but I'm just about to run out the door...

frozenfrozen

Danger781 wrote: »

Makes sense to me!

New to whole server world myself. Ended up going with the HP ProLiant Gen8 Microserver and have been documenting my progress and just general things I've learned in my blog. Just a few days ago I set up sonarr, couchpotato, plex and transmission for automated media sorting. I'm running unRAID 6.0 (http://lime-technology.com/) so I have Docker containers, VM, and NAS all in one.

I'll be willing to go into more detail but I'm just about to run out the door...

I'll read your blog sounds like you're doing nearly the same thing as I want!

Cuddlesworth

If you're comfortable with stupid electricity bills and the sweet sound of a plane taking off, a 2U server would be the best bet.

What's your budget, what do you really want, what do you actually need?

frozenfrozen

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

If you're comfortable with stupid electricity bills and the sweet sound of a plane taking off, a 2U server would be the best bet.

What's your budget, what do you really want, what do you actually need?

I need storage which will do around 400mB/s sustained, decent enough iops so thumbnails and all that kind of stuff isn't slow, and some sort of redundancy so if a drive fails I'm not too ****ed. I'm not sure how much space I actually need I suppose around 10tB, can start off much less and then I can add more and eventually download the whole internet.

I couldn't actually do a 2U rack server it would be nice to play with but the noise and power draw would mean I couldn't leave it on a lot of the time

not sure what the budget is I suppose a grand or so although that's nearly what the drives alone would cost so I don't really know

It's kind of half for messing around and having for movies and stuff and half for editing video stuff and storing lots of photoshop stuff which are all fairly big files and would need to be fast

I've just been having a look at using hyperv and passing individual drives through to some os with zfs. then I could iscsi to that from windows and be sorted. the only cost incurred would be the drives and a HBA? and for less than a grand I'd be able to do 4 x 4tb wd blacks a second hand lsi hba and a small ssd for l2 arc or whatever they call it in zfs for cache?

Cuddlesworth

frozenfrozen wrote: »

I need storage which will do around 400mB/s sustained, decent enough iops so thumbnails and all that kind of stuff isn't slow, and some sort of redundancy so if a drive fails I'm not too ****ed. I'm not sure how much space I actually need I suppose around 10tB, can start off much less and then I can add more and eventually download the whole internet.

So in essence, you want a fast transfer rate, high IOPS, quiet, low power, high capacity system with backup for 1k. Thats not do-able at that price. There will be some compromise.

I'd spec the following for what you asked for.
a synology DS1515+
4*WD 3tb red
large capacity SSD as read cache.
Amazon cloud subscription unlimited $60 per year

You can purchase a expansion unit and upgrade capacity in the future. Migration to a large NAS is easy. It also runs many of the applications you listed and does it hassle free. I have a USB3.0 drive hanging off mine that provides access to movies/random files, meaning the majority of the investment is used for actual important files, not wasted on downloaded ****e. Their cloud sync tool will backup your data to Amazon for a very low cost.

I have a couple of microservers, although I've retired most of them. I think the OS in the synology is well worth the price difference.

frozenfrozen wrote: »

It's kind of half for messing around and having for movies and stuff and half for editing video stuff and storing lots of photoshop stuff which are all fairly big files and would need to be fast

Is the investment required worth the cost involved?

frozenfrozen wrote: »

I've just been having a look at using hyperv and passing individual drives through to some os with zfs. then I could iscsi to that from windows and be sorted. the only cost incurred would be the drives and a HBA? and for less than a grand I'd be able to do 4 x 4tb wd blacks a second hand lsi hba and a small ssd for l2 arc or whatever they call it in zfs for cache?

Over engineered and guaranteed to fail. At that point you just buy a raid card and drives for your system and put a synology play into your house with what's left over to serve as a media NAS.

ED E

The array is actually kinda busy right now (didnt feel like killing the services on top)...



Sepherucus put together an awesome little box which I essentially copied part for part. Works delightfully, pulls about 55W from the wall peak and is very quiet (silent when compared to rack servers).

You really dont need all that power to serve files quickly. Above is with 2 drives being read/written and one just doing parity. If I upped it to 6 live drives + 2 parity those figures would rise significantly.

This is all using the C2750D4i (8 core avaton[atom]) and Flexraid. Only downside is its snapshot raid not true raid. So if you want better protection you can take one step up to ZFS which is awesome or wait a little while until BTRFS the new god mode array filesystem is out of its current beta state. Just consumes a little more RAM.

vlad2009

Are people getting on the Win10 hype?

I hear that with win 10 will now have gamerscore. One thing I miss about consoles was my gamerscore, not a big deal for most but when you actually have worked to get the gamer score, it's a shame to abandon it like that.

So I was thinking of maybe picking of a copy of win 8.1 on reddit that has the win 10 upgrade.

ED E

Gamers should upgrade for DX12 anyways.

Danger781

I love Windows 8.1 and from the little I've seen of Windows 10 it looks to be an improvement of Windows 8.1

Sounds like a no-brainer to me!

EDIT: Just to clarify, because what I said sounds stupid. When I had Windows 7 upgrading to 8 wasn't a priority for me. The UI seemed weird and daunting compared to what I used to. This time actually looks to improve on the current implementation!

vlad2009

Yeah I agree with you on that, it does seem like an improvement in terms of UI.

wotzgoingon

I always upgrade to the latest windows from XP to 7 (skipped Vista) then to 8 and now 8.1
I don't know why a lot of people hate 8/8.1 it takes a small amount of time to get used to the new settings layout but once you figure it out it is perfect. I was running the preview of 10 and bringing back the start menu is stupid imo. But I suppose that was the main problem everyone had so I suppose Microsoft went with the masses.

Danger781

Got myself a switch tester

Dair76

What are the other two keys Danger, and what are their differences? Mine only has the four (red, blue, black and brown).

vlad2009

Interesting. I plan on getting a mech also, trying to hold out until the Asus claymore comes out. If it is decently priced I'll get that, but not really sure if I'll be able to wait that long.

Dair76

The Claymore looks good, but I think it'll be one of the most expensive keyboards on the market.