Cheesebaron

Kind of boring and monotone. Not my style, at least it is not Bieber 4/10

I void warranties.

Sounds like a Ground-loop then. Does your plug to your power supply have 3 legs? If so try one with two and vice versa.

How exactly are you applying that thermal paste and how much?

It sounds to me like you have a lot of interference or a ground-loop in your PC, what kind of power supply do you have? Does the noise alter if you do something resource intensive on your PC, such as starting a file transfer or similar? Sometimes moving the mouse is enough to provoke it. If you have a powered hub lying around that might be able to help you as it isolates the +5V from the USB and uses the power from the wall-wart. Otherwise using some device to galvanically isolate the headset and the PC would also help.

Hi there, I own and use a Xonar D2x myself since it came out, best sound card I have ever owned. Instead of using the drivers ASUS provide, I use the UNi Xonar drivers since they use less memory and have a bit less latency. As to speakers and headphones, the better the speakers or headphone the more you will be able to notice, given that you are not hearing impaired. I would say the difference is big between an on-board card and a proper sound card, especially if you know what to listen for and the difference will be very clear of you A/B test the equipment with less than a couple of seconds when switching between them, as sound memory doesn't last very long, at least not for me.

Some other good headphones in that price range are: Skullcandy ROC Nation Aviator, Creative Aurvana Live! and Philips Citiscape Uptown. My advice is you go to your local retailers and try some headphones, we can only tell what we like to hear, which might not be what you like to hear.

Mine comes from a time a friend and I were laming on Jedi Academy servers screwing peoples duels and what not. It just sticks!

So you are asking for some piece of equipment that you can get for very cheap and allow you to put a USB HDD on the network? Well you choices are limited to a cheap NAS or a cheap computer of some sort. This could be anything ranging from a Laptop with a busted screen to a raspberry pi.

I use a Dell 3008WFP 30" (2560x1600), it is pretty nice except it has some input lag, but I have gotten used to it. I got it really cheap as the previous owner managed to scratch it up a bit and did not know what to sell it for :D I have a 24" Dell screen at work too. They are both very good quality and reproduce colors very well. Any UltraSharp Dell monitor will give you great satisfaction.

You can buy a router with similar capabilities and just hook up to the router your ISP has issued. You don't need to replace the ISP router.

Mind you this is in prime time: Edit: new test outside of prime time: Edit: Got a slight upgrade, prime time speed again:

Don't worry the 700XB's are wicked comfortable. People buy broken MDR-xxxxXB series off of ebay just to get cheap spare earpads to put on other headphones where they fit.

At that price point the Creative Aurvana Live are also a very good pick or the Porta Pro. My advice is to find a store where you can take your source and try different headphones to see what floats your boat. Good sound has a lot to do with personal preference and you will have people recommending all kinds of headphones and none of them might be something that you like.

Your headphones are designed to be driven directly from a sound card without any amplification, so they will probably not benefit greatly from being amped. You could try at some point putting a cheap Cmoy amp in between and see if you notice anything greatly different except from volume boost. The Cmoy amps can be found as kits or pre-made on ebay for quite cheap.

The difference between an on-board sound card and an aftermarket dedicated sound card is not night and day. However if you A/B test the two cards, you might notice some differences. These differences become more apparent when you have high-fidelity equipment connected as a part of your sound chain and especially if you have trained ears to notice these differences. ​ This is not true, this will not alter the sound quality, however it will alter the sound signature and IMO it is not an improvement of the audio as such, but more an alteration of the sound to your preferences. The quality of the audio solely relies on the source of the audio and how the equipment in the audio chain reproduces it.

Why not go with something entirely external? Such as Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD? It sounds decent, it has both 5.1 and has front panel connectors. Even better, you can use it with a laptop if you wanted to. It also has pretty decent drivers.

My setup at the moment is: Asus Xonar D2x -> TOSLink -> Audio-gd 10.2 -> Balanced output -> HiFiMan HE-300 I have also got some powered Audioengine A5 speakers on Sinn7 desk foam stands and a Project Debut III record player for stuff that can't be sourced on digital media.

I would personally go for outfitting the house with CAT6 or CAT7 (Class F or Class Fa (Fa can carry 40GBps at lengths of 50m)) and settle with 10GB interfaces for now. Why? Ethernet is more available and in the long run more affordable.

Seems like a pretty solid build. I would consider some other fans for the system than what comes with the case and the H100i cooler.

For me it is an obvious choice of getting the Intel i5 3570K, because the AMD counterpart uses much more power and has a larger TDP. Overclock that i5 and you will destroy that AMD CPU! Keep in mind that a motherboard is either supporting AMD OR Intel CPU's not both, so please make sure you are picking the right one for the right CPU.

You are saying that the data stored on the drives are of no particular value to you. However imagine this scenario: You went to a LAN party and all of the sudden your one of your HDDs in your RAID0 dies. All your games are stored there. So instead of having fun with your friends, you are swearing over your mishap and spending time on re-acquiring the games you want to play and recovering from the damages. I would consider running RAID5 with 3 disks and be able to lose 1 disk at a time without loss of data and without a big performance hit. But if you really don't care about your data, go ahead then.