The "New Toys" Thread

Galantti;n3545425 said:
for work nothing, for home nothing than something to drool over :p

It's nothing more than a pain in the big old Precision towers we have when it goes wrong, thankfully it isn't my money. :lol:
 
So, after many many years I decided to build a new PC.

Intel 8700K
ASUS 1080Ti 11G Strix
ASUS Prime Z370A Main Board
2 x 16GB RipJaw 3200
1 x Samsung 960 Pro 512 M.2
2 x WD 2TB WD Blacks in Raid 0

Solitaire has never been so quick!
 
Do you mind telling us how much that 1080 Ti cost you?
 
Nevermind that, the RAM must've been expensive as hell. :p
 
Since the FritzBox I got from my ISP was really bugging me out, I got something better to replace it:
[IMG2=JSON]{"data-align":"none","data-size":"full","src":"https:\/\/img.routerboard.com\/mimg\/1108_hi_res.png"}[/IMG2]
MikroTik RouterBoard RB2011UiAS

And the necessary hardware to use it with my ISP:

[IMG2=JSON]{"data-align":"none","data-size":"full","src":"https:\/\/static.tp-link.com\/res\/images\/products\/gallery\/TL-SM321B.jpg"}[/IMG2]
[IMG2=JSON]{"data-align":"none","data-size":"full","src":"https:\/\/www.utp-kabel.nl\/media\/catalog\/product\/cache\/5\/image\/736x460\/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95\/G\/V\/GV-4102_2.jpg"}[/IMG2]
TP-Link TL-SM321B and a SC to LC simplex multimode cable.
 
GRtak;n3545751 said:
Do you mind telling us how much that 1080 Ti cost you?

My first born.....or $1399 AUD

And as for the RAM. $600AUD total.

Not a great time to buy.
 
No it is not a good time to build your own. I just helped a friend look up prices and then search for a fairly high end pre built, and he bought the pre built. All in all I think it was a wash, but he did not have to build a system and got a better cooling setup, and it has a warranty.
 
IceBone;n3545798 said:

You finally bought an iPhone?

Sorry, I just had to.

I sold some old Apple junk used the money towards some new Apple junk, an iPad Pro 10.5 64GB Wi-Fi. Cheapest version, in other words. I really wanted LTE, but for some reason power.fi had the Wi-Fi version in Silver, Gold and Salmon PinkRose Gold for €100 less than the usual retail price. That put the 64 gig LTE version at a €250 premium and that's not worth it with my use case. I can tether for those occasions, which to be honest aren't going to be very many.

I've had several iPads before but this is the first one that's powerful enough that I can see myself using it for actually Getting Stuff Done™. The 120Hz screen is really nice when scrolling, and that's what you're doing on an iPad 90% of the time. I ordered a Khomo case for it too. It's a lot like the Smart Case that Apple apparently doesn't make anymore. I briefly considered the vanilla iPad 9.7" with LTE, but 10 seconds of playing with both in the store was enough to scrap that idea.


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Adunaphel;n3545931 said:
We have a Khomo case for our iPAd Air, it's quite nice, and really sturdy.

Yes, it's nice and great value for money. Of course it's plastic and fabric instead of the Apple leather, but more affordable materials doesn't make it any less well made.

It came already, by the way. I ordered it from Amazon on Saturday, accidentally from the US store because I used the phone app and didn't pay attention. From the other side of the planet via a hub in Germany (iirc), another hub in Finland and then via the local depot to me. The DHL driver showed up at half past two today. This has to be some kind a of record.

The biggest Finnish IT retailer would probably have managed to send me the tracking details by now, but knowing them it'd take until tomorrow before the parcel leaves their shipping department and then another day for the Finnish post to get it to me.

I apologize for the ginormous picture, btw. I was fighting with the built in image uploader which kept throwing an error. I gave up, put them on imgur, faffed around some more because the URL didn't want to paste as clear text and after finally making it work I noticed the forum doesn't scale huge images anymore.
 
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So I finally reached the point where I needed more frames than my trusty old GTX670 could put out:

For the insufferably curious: it ended up costing me 1040 shipped, so 900-950 for the card itself, plus some more shipping it to mu, and yet more in taxes.

PS: don't mind the dust, I cleaned it out after.. I was quite excited at having a shiny new GPU :p

Also decided my NAS needed to be back online, so one supermicro server later (and even more hideous shipping costs):

Specs:
Supermicro SC846 case with BPN-846A direct-wire backplane and dual 920W platinum SuperQuiet™ PSUs
Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F motherboard
Dual Intel E5-2630L CPUs
128GB (8x16GB) DDR3-1066 ECC RDIMMs
3x LS9210-8i in IT mode
Rails (only mentioned because standalone those buggers cost about 150+shipping)

Still missing:
  1. some manner of 10GBASE-X card
  2. SFP+ modules
  3. enough fiber to wire the the house up
  4. a rack to hold all that crap in
  5. a UPS
 
Wanted to test 144Hz (or anything north of 60Hz really) and 1ms (fake2fake, w/e) on a TN panel and see if it is worth further pursuing for the purpose of gaming compared to a slow 60Hz IPS panel. Since I didn't wanna go full retard and also not up the resolution, I went for a used cheap 1080p 24" Acer (Predator something something bla bla). First test seem to indicate a noticable improvement, but I'll go and test a bit more than 5 minutes between phone calls in a bit. If I like what I see, I'll probably add some more frames via a 1060 or something of that liking.

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Not a big deal for most of you FGers, but it is for us old folks. We finally bit the bullet and bought a new tower for the house. We don’t do any real gaming, so our priorities are different…
It’s a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710t.
Intel Core i7-6700
16GB RAM
1 TB HDD
DVD writer
Windows 10

Since we opted for Windows 10 (Win 7 was the default), we also ‘had’ to buy Office 2016, which is taking a bit of getting-used-to. On the whole, we’re satisfied; but the change-over hasn’t been all that easy – but again, we haven’t hit any major snags, just time-consuming twiddling to make everything work.

SL
 
That's a very nice PC. if you feel it's still a bit slow, you should be able to install an SSD and keep it feeling fast and fresh for longer.
 
This. Even to just put Windows and the handful of programs you use most on it. Boot time is super short, and everything just feels snappy.
 
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Sony MDR-XB950N1 headphones. My trusty Kingston Headset was quite fine, just took up a lot of space in my work bag. This folds up a lot smaller, and has the added benefits of being cordless and having noise cancelling to boot. Sound requires a bit of fiddling to get right, but turning the bass down in the app really helped, and some EQ tweaking later it has really come alive.
 
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Finally gave in and got myself a pair of Airpods:

MMEF2


I still consider them overpriced, but didn't see a real alternative for myself. I wanted small wireless earbuds to be used primarily in the gym and for running, since cables annoy me a lot there. I can't wear "proper" in-ear headphones without ear pain (tried many models with various "cup" sizes, all with the same result), and the normal Earpods seems fairly perfectly shaped for my ears.

Have been using them for a week now, and honestly I should've got them ages ago :) Sound quality is very decent, they stay solidly in my ears without any danger of falling out, they hold ~4-5 hours on a charge (music only, ~2-3 hours when used as a headset for calls) and recharge very quickly from the case, that holds ~5 total charges. And the user experience is really well thought out: no need to switch anything on or off, just remove from case and plug into the ears, they connect automatically. Hold the case open near the phone, phone shows a popup with battery status (separate for the case and both earbuds). Start playback, Spotify shows the device name as playback target so you're sure it won't accidentally start blaring via phone speakers. Take one out during playback, music pauses; put it back in, playback resumes. And there's extra controls that can be mapped on earbud double-tap; defaults to Siri, I set mine to previous track (left) / next track (right). And finally, they can be paired to non-Apple devices like any other Bluetooth headset - that was the straw that made me finally give them a try.
 
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