The "New Toys" Thread

Blayde said:
The 980 is unjustifiable if you have any sort of budget, my main reason for going for one was 1440p vs 1080p, and that I will add another down the line, so a single 970 didn't work for me. I recommend anyone looking at nvidias a 970 and tell them I have a 980 to drive home the point. It's an excellent price for what you get and a good card
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The problem even then is that a 970 SLI is a better proposition, but from someone who added a second GPU far down the line, if you commit to SLI, you have to commit when you buy, otherwise by the time you find you need SLI, better single-GPU cards are already around.

But you know what's an even worse problem than the 980 pricing? early aviailability of the 970s. Now that the big initial demand surge has gone down, they're still somewhat hard to get a hold of if you're looking for the popular cards (the stupid (IMO) dual/triple-fan designs). Good for those of us planning watercooled builds though: plenty of blower designs using the 670 PCB to go round for us :D
 
My new toy is a notice that I should visit the postal office very soon. What will I get there? These blank PBT keycaps from Banggood!
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Steambox timeeee

Gigabyte mini-ITX 1150 board
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Coolermaster Elite 120
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Intel i7-4790k
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Crucial MX100 256GB SSD
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MSI R9 270X OC
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Put that together with a 2tb Seagate Barracuda Green I have lying around, and a 550W Modular PSU I have lying around.

Got my christmas bonus, decided to go all spendy spendy. Some special deals I got will wrap this thing up right at $550, I think that's fair for a nice high-midrange media center / steambox. Need to decide what gamepad to use. Probably a Xbone controller. Obviously the i7 is complete overkill but... I got it for $130. So whatever. Probably will add an H80i with silent fans to quiet it down at some point, but I want to see how loud it'll be first.

I MAY go down to the Elite 110, which is a lot smaller, and switch to a ITX factor GTX 760. It's about $50 more but super short and will fit, aaaaand it's a 760.
 
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Is there a PC version of the One controller?
 
Building a HTPC and storage box. I'll post all the stuff I bought later (turns out the old mobo I had doesn't like such large drives) but meanwhile who wants some storage space?

The Reds on the right are the new ones and will be in RAID 5 in this new box.

The Blacks in the middle used to be in RAID 0 for my desktop OS. They've been replaced by SSDs in RAID 0. I'll use one of these for my HTPC OS.

The Greens on the left are from an old NAS and they are past their safe head park count due to stupid power savings. I didn't use WDIDLE3 in time so I don't trust them. I'm giving them to a friend who doesn't care about reliability.

Not pictured: 4x3TB Greens and 4x4TB Reds in Synology NASes. :)

 
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Had to get this in case power cuts out from Super Typhoon Hagupit (Ruby). Should power the inverter refrigerator, charging of notebooks, tablets, smartphones, LED flashlights and powering LED night lights and electric fans.
 
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After a fairly long deliberation, got myself a Kindle Paperwhite. I've borrowed one from a roommate a couple times, and finally decided I wanted one too. Price reduction to 99? and the currently extended money-back guarantee (until Jan 31st) certainly helped.

I definitely prefer it to the iPad, at least as far as reading is concerned. Which I guess is the point, really. The E-Ink display is nice, great contrast and much faster refresh time than my dad's Sony PRS-something reader had a couple years ago. 212 PPI resolution is lower that I'd like, but it's not noticeable at reading distance - text appears perfectly crisp, even after switching to the thinner Palatino font. Touchscreen is responsive (amazingly so actually for an E-Ink device, in rare cases where one has to use the onscreen keyboard it works pretty well), and backlight is nice and even, adjustable in brightness in a huge range.

I did consider getting the new high-res Voyage, but it'll only be available on 22nd, and it's almost double the price. If I get my hands on one some time in January and like it that much, I can still return the Paperwhite and upgrade.
 
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neat. i'm actually sort of waiting for my non-touch kindle4 to give up the ghost, just so i can get my hands on one of those nicer models... but i guess that ain't happening anytime soon. to be honest, even the old budget model is perfectly fine :dunno: luckily, i haven't had the possibility to even try a paperwhite, so that keeps the want low :D
 
My home network has been flaky lately so I decided to throw some money at the problem:



And as it turns out, the stock Asus firmware doesn't do multicast DNS properly. Apple relies heavily on this for device discovery across LAN. File/printer sharing, airplay and whatnot. The box even has "works with windows 7/8 and mac" written on it, but the most basic of things don't work right.

Thankfully there's a third party firmware (merlin's) that fixes the problem, but I'm still miffed that Asus can't be bothered to make their shit work right out of the box. According to various forum posts and blogs I found when troubleshooting this issue, it isn't just the 68U either.

Oh well, it's fast and has every feature under the sun. Supposedly it's reliable, too. Time will tell. And most importantly, it has a hardware button on the back that turns off all the LEDs. Every router should have this.
 
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