Lauen

From personal experience, there is a pretty big difference if you just find the right pair for your ears. Shure SRH440's are 99 bucks and to my ears sound a lot better than HyperX Clouds. the Clouds aren't bad, it's just that the SRH440s are better for merely 10 more bucks, with much clearer overall sound, especially in the bass department, and is a little more balanced. some prefer lots of bass and the SRH440's are not for those kinds of people, but then you can instead grab a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M40X. they sound very similar to M50X but cost less. a good deal of bass, sparkly highs and alright mids. too much bass and highs for me though. 

I have soldered on a new cable once or twice, the hard part is figuring out which cable does what. there's a ground, left and right channel (in the main cable before the splitter thing) and if there's a mic, a cable for that too. the individual cables are usually really really thin and covered with some stuff I think is for insulation maybe. as long as you're not swapping to a new cable, you can essentially just strip back some of the rubber around the cable to expose the wires inside, if they are covered with color coded insulating stuff you can burn it off with a lighter, but be gentle. then just match the cables by color, solder them together, use heatshrink or electrical tape and to cover the wires individually and then as a complete package, and then you should be good. 
 
did this to swap a cable to a new one once, and another time I had a phone without a headphone jack (good old HTC Touch Cruise with Windows Mobile 6.0 and just a USB Mini B port). came with a set of awful earbuds, I cut off the cable right after the microphone and soldered on cables for a Koss Porta Pro and used that for half a year until I could afford a better phone. 
 
do this at your own risk however, I do not guarantee it'll work, especially if you do not have any experience soldering. 

Yes, I know those microphones. They are AWFUL. (former user here ?)  But that's why I said that a dynamic microphone is more expensive than you'd think, because you need to get a good one, and you'll need some proper interface to use it. What I meant to say is that I'm not aware of any good dynamic mic that plugs right into a pc.

bringing the blue snowball closer to your face and further from your keyboard will help a lot. I got a 12 dollar neweer stand for my snowball and although you CAN hear my keyboard it really isn't all that bad unless you slam your keys with the force of 1000 suns. I don't however have one of those clicky switches like MX Blue or anything of that sort, I have linear switches. 
 
For a different kind of fix that requires more money, a directional mic or at least dynamic mic will help. best case scenario will be a shotgun mic, some of the better examples like RØDE NTG series can be 200 dollars pretty quickly and then you'll also need an interface for it, which will probably start at like 50 bucks. 
 
ModMic is another option, getting the mic real close and you can turn down the gain so it'll pick up less keyboard in relation to mouth noises. 50 bucks starting price and you just plug it in and glue a little magnet to your headphones. pretty easy. 

why are looks even something you consider? won't you just be sitting in your room playing video games anyway? you won't be looking in a mirror all day. 

Why not go for a slightly less janky setup and get a simple USB soundcard that you use for either the headphones or the speakers and just switch the sound output? If your post signature is up to date and you're still using Windows 7, there's a program called SoundSwitch. If you have upgraded to Windows 10 you can just click the audio icon and switch it there. 
 
By all means, using a splitter works. I just think it'd be a nicer solution overall to do what I suggested. You do you. 

My favorite Wireless headphones are the Sony wh-1000xm3 (bluetooth). If your PC has bluetooth these should work just fine.
 
For a wired solution, get a FiiO K5 and the headphones of your choosing. Many people will disagree on the "best" headphones. If you liked the sound of your previous sennheisers, consider the Sennheiser HD 6xx from drop.com

They really don't. I used to work customer service for them, but through a customer service company operating on a contract with Apple, in a foreign country. It was 1 out of 3 locations, all in different countries and companies, and with different trainers. It WAS a norwegian-speaking support line, but they only had phone lines. no emails, no chat. training was done in english with 2 trainers that had worked on english and italian lines, and of course the cultures are very different so some of the things we were told to say were sorta weird. The office hosted multiple language teams, including french, dutch, norwegian, danish, swedish and finnish. The nordics were lumped together on the same phone system with no distinction between the languages. Any day I worked for the first 5 months, I'd just hear the phone ring and had to just check the country code to see what language I'd get. Finnish was the hardest because of the language differences and the fact that quite a lot of finns are not exactly great at english. 
 
when it was solved, we learned that there was a "skills" page, where they differentiated your language skills and skills in sales or aftersales. Prior to the language fix, we were all set to 10/10 skill in all the nordic languages (excluding the french and dutch lines of course as they were alright) and after the fix I was set to 10/10 norwegian, 5 in swedish and danish, and a 2 in finnish I think. 
 
And then eventually the entire contract I was on was sacked, with the excuse being "Apple are looking to unite the best workers under one roof". I was friends with some of the workers in the other companies and they didn't even know my team got sacked, and had not heard anything about the unification of workers and locations. AFAIK it still hasn't happened they way we were informed. 
 
All in all, not great. coworkers were fantastic people though. 

They really don't. I used to work customer service for them, but through a customer service company operating on a contract with Apple, in a foreign country. It was 1 out of 3 locations, all in different countries and companies, and with different trainers. It WAS a norwegian-speaking support line, but they only had phone lines. no emails, no chat. training was done in english with 2 trainers that had worked on english and italian lines, and of course the cultures are very different so some of the things we were told to say were sorta weird. The office hosted multiple language teams, including french, dutch, norwegian, danish, swedish and finnish. The nordics were lumped together on the same phone system with no distinction between the languages. Any day I worked for the first 5 months, I'd just hear the phone ring and had to just check the country code to see what language I'd get. Finnish was the hardest because of the language differences and the fact that quite a lot of finns are not exactly great at english. 
 
when it was solved, we learned that there was a "skills" page, where they differentiated your language skills and skills in sales or aftersales. Prior to the language fix, we were all set to 10/10 skill in all the nordic languages (excluding the french and dutch lines of course as they were alright) and after the fix I was set to 10/10 norwegian, 5 in swedish and danish, and a 2 in finnish I think. 
 
And then eventually the entire contract I was on was sacked, with the excuse being "Apple are looking to unite the best workers under one roof". I was friends with some of the workers in the other companies and they didn't even know my team got sacked, and had not heard anything about the unification of workers and locations. AFAIK it still hasn't happened they way we were informed. 
 
All in all, not great. coworkers were fantastic people though. 

If it doesn't get loud enough for you, you don't need an amp. 
 
if there's audible artifacting / pops / hissing, you need a new dac and maybe an amp (hissing could be a high noise floor) 
 
if you just want bass, most music programs come with EQ settings, or you can get a stereo amplifier as those generally have some tone control knobs. a used stereo amp from like.. early 90s can be had for as low as 20 bucks, at least that's what my amp cost me. 

Ok so you have different issue then the one i had, good luck.
Could be anything PSU,CPU,Motherboard, etc.
I would find a friend who has lots of computer hardware and try testing stuff. 
Or just take it to a computer shop for diagnosis.

The G403 is already one of the best tracking mice, so in terms of tracking accuracy, and there being no acceleration and deceleration, there won't be much of a difference. 

Hey you know what's funny? The fact that the Rage X2 silhouette has the PCIe slot finger too far from the bracket.

How come almost nobody has noticed the fact that the X2 card's PCI-e interface is too far away from the bracket? lul, very obviously fake. And why would an X2 card have the same SP's as a single? 
 

How come almost nobody has noticed the fact that the X2 card's PCI-e interface is too far away from the bracket? lul, very obviously fake. And why would an X2 card have the same SP's as a single? 
 

How come almost nobody has noticed the fact that the X2 card's PCI-e interface is too far away from the bracket? lul, very obviously fake. And why would an X2 card have the same SP's as a single? 
 

Not sure what you're not understanding. What he's saying is: AMD need to price it according to their performance relative to Intels CPUs. 
 
They can't really afford to undercut Intel as they don't have a whole lotta money, while Intel does. 

Why would AMD sell a 6 core CPU for 200$? ZEN is supposed to bring them back in the game, not dump the market price. AMD needs to make money, not throw them out of the window.
 
Even IF Intel's similar models would have a small performance plus (like 10% or so), AMD can still be competitive by having better OC capabilities, soldered TIM, more PCI lanes, better motherboard chipsets, etc. You have to look at the larger picture here.
 

Keep in mind that AMD and Intel rate their TDPs in a different way. Intel use a common use case, while AMD is more like.. 100% AIDA64 type thing. 

I see what you are saying, but you are saying AMD will price Zen over 100 dollars below Intel's offering, or about 30% lower. I said just below Intel. I'm pretty sure just below doesn't mean 30% lower. I'm saying that AMD may price Zen, say, 40 dollars below Intel.
 
True, that is a good point. I am making the assumption Zen is good because AMD they are screwed if otherwise. However, it is true I might be wrong.

Not sure what you're not understanding. What he's saying is: AMD need to price it according to their performance relative to Intels CPUs. 
 
They can't really afford to undercut Intel as they don't have a whole lotta money, while Intel does. 

You're the only person saying a 6 core + hyperthreading Zen will compete with a 4 core no hyperthreading i5. 
You're being quite negative about the future of AMD. It's in our best interest, all of us, that AMD actually does well with the Zen series. Don't dismiss them just yet. It's basically their last effort, let's all just hope they don't die. Don't assume they'll kick Intels ass either, just hope they don't die. 

AMD said Zen will have around 40% more IPC than their newest architecture, which is Excavator. This puts the IPC between Ivy Bridge and Haswell.
Then Zen will have a maximum rated TDP of 95w, so we can expect 8 core with SMT to have low speeds to be in that range.
 
People think Zen will be the next big thing, but the only big things in the near future will be facepalms...
Zen will be more of a close gap to intel rather than a new king.
 
 
 

Personally I don't ZEN will beat Kaby Lake in IPC, but I don't think ZEN needs to either. Remember that -E versions (for X99) and afaik XEON processors are one generation behind. If ZEN can launch their high end chips straight up, and not be one generation behind, that would help a lot.
 
At the end of the day, AMD just have to be competitive. They don't need the koth chips, as most people don't have 5960x' or 24 core XEON's anyways. If you skip the highest end chips and the i5/i7 K SKU's, most of Intels chips, are rather weak and lame.
ZEN has huge potential in the mainstream market, especially considering their superior iGPU's.
 
So ZEN needs to be good enough to get the highend gaming market and the server market to support entire server parks with ZEN CPU's and FirePro GPU's. That alone will get AMD back in the game. The notion that it's all or nothing on the highest end makes no sense.

i3 is a quad.