BrightCandle

How about I test it?!
 
Base volume (measured by my mobile phone, using same distance and placement of the key on a key base for a sample tester kit of switches).
 
Base volume - 37Db
 
Any of the keys bottomed out is 56-60Db pretty reliably. But testing my Corsair K70 (Reds) it comes out around 81Db bottomed out and 70-73 Db without bottoming out so more noise will occur on a keyboard compared to my key tester.
 
On the key tester pad (much quieter):
Reds 40 DB activated
Blues 48-53Db activated
Browns 40Db activated
Clear 43Db activated
Black 41-42Db activated
 
So there you have it Reds/Browns, Blacks, Clear, Blues in that order, blues are more than 2x as loud at activation point compared to the others. Most keys are barely above background noise.

It's only in the less expensive markets that Freesync vs g-sync is a huge price difference. 
 
When you get to 1440p 144hz, ultrawides etc it stops be of any huge impact.

I know of no solution that gets close to the virtual barbershop, it uses binaural cues that you don't find in sound cards today. The best solution remains 5.1 in Windows with appropriate game mode and SBX pro enabled. I would love for us to have genuine binaural input but its going to require a massive change in sound APIs back to the way they were in the 2000s.

Watch this guys videos, he has some roundups you will likely find interesting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJaDZC7PChgd-XMwcbZkiw

The manufacturers claims as to the latency are a complete fabrication. Really good monitors today might in practice get 5ms of processing and switch time at best, at worst its more like 40ms. Both of those monitors will likely claim a 1ms response time, but they will be using different things to measure. Then you have how awful the overdrive will be, some will ghost, some will produce inversions and some will get it just right.
 
Don't just buy a monitor based on the manfacturers, go read a decent review from somewhere like tftcentral.co.uk and see for yourself. Because those spec sheets are a complete fabrication.

The games I have played the most:
 
Arma 3 - multiplayer with my community milsim
Minecraft - with mods like feed the beast
Kerbal space program
Battlefield 4
 

Was this sponsored by Swiftech? You said you "teamed up with them" but you didn't say it was sponsored by them.

A quick format having removed all reference to the files will mean its basically impossible for the OS to load any old virus stored in the contents of the drive. A full format would wipe most sectors to 0 and remove the ability for any software or commercial entity to recover any contents that was on it. A quick format is sufficient.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4438900/how-to-view-dll-functions

An experienced high refresh rate user can in a blind test spot the difference between 144 and 120. I used to prefer 75 v 60 in the CRT days as well. So yes these are all noticeable increments where we can tell the difference.
 
Personally I think the best place to be is the 144hz gsync monitors, gsync is the best thing to happen to monitor technology in a long time and it really does solve the grand majority of fps issues with games. You'll find the minimum playable fps will be lower than you are used to, it'll feel less responsive and you can see its a lower FPS but its also not stuttering its still smoothly produced. That isn't to say the jump from 60 to 144 isn't important because it is, but getting both is a big perception jump because gsync images are more solid because you don't have tear lines. That makes it probably the most important upgrade from a graphical fidelity point of view.

Their claims aren't beyond possibility. There is no good reason why we can't have a better system for finding what colour to render than casting a ray out to see what it intersects with first. When John Carmack first came up with binary space partioning combined with pre rendered maps the end result was a dramatic increase in visual fidelity. He worked out a way to enormously reduce the search space and combine it with substantially better lighting than computers of the day could do.
 
So could Euclideon make a better search algorithm for point clouds? Sure that is absolutely possible especially when you consider that voxel engines are a lot less explored in research. One of the reasons the engine is taking a lot of time to potentially hit mass market is they have a lot of issues to resolve to compete in the gaming market. They needed animation and that is really hard to do in voxels, they need anti aliasing and good lighting/shadows and all of this is having to be reinvented for the voxel world to run efficiently. Since the current research says these are more expensive its also combined with the possibility that whatever they are doing in regards to improving search is also going to make those things harder to deal with. Its not too hard to make a much more efficient search if things aren't going to move and change, so you can preprocess it a lot. But if it has moving entities in it then the search becomes more complicated as its different every frame.
 
Their technology isn't unbelieveable, its just very early still and they are going to be stuck with all the disadvantages of voxels that we already know about. The worst being the enormous drive space requirements, there is a reason they talk about hard drive streaming in their interview with pcper because a game world like we are used to would take hundreds of GBs.

It should be noted the Zowie mice are not long lasting, the wheels are poorly made but its not the only longevity issue they have. Been through 4 now in a little over 4 years.

Have a look at hardocp.com's VR reviews. They have been testing a 1060 (which is about a 980 in performance) which will give you a good idea of how much reprojection and dropped frames. I had a 970 and it was fine for the VR specific games I was playing (lab, Space pirate trainer etc). As I moved onto Elite dangerous/Truck Simulator/Project cars it was pretty apparent that I was going to have to reduce visual quality dramatically and VR was a big driver for me to stop using 2x970's and move to a 1080.
 
There is no harm in trying it yourself but one of the key problems in VR is aliasing effects, because the pixels are really large compared to a screen. Combine that with the large amount of overrender to compensate for the lenses and you have a high resolution (twice that of the  2160x1200 you would expect) and a real need for super sampling AA, which further increases the resolution. VR games basically look best when you are rendering at 6k, SS + Overender on top of the base resolution and it is very hard to get that performing well in any game not directly designed for VR. So the amount of GPU you want really depends on what you are trying to do, if elite dangerous is your thing get something faster. Even a 1080 with a Vive isn't fast enough to make Truck simulator (a pretty basic looking game) look good enough to be "worth it" in my opinion, it was compelling but it looked awful with a lot of pixel crawl.

A few things to consider. Make sure the sound device is in 5.1 mode as it will default to stereo. Also important to note that toslink can't support 5.1 pcm so you need DTS/Dolby encoding from the card and decoding on the other end.

It all comes from typewriters that had two separate functions, one for returning the head to the left of the paper and one for advancing the paper a line. UNIX decided to do away with compatibility, dos and then windows didn't. Now it's just one of those annoying backward compatiblity things you have to deal with but both platforms mostly consume the other and ignore the differences except occasionally.

This isn't sounding like a surround issue, sounds like an EQ issue where you want the footsteps volume boosted like game headphones often do. The sennheisers have a great response time and neutral sound but most gaming headphones boost the lower frequencies. Some sound cards have a gaming mode that boosts these as well. You can simulate it however since footsteps in GO are around 200-500hz so if you boost that say +10Dba they will be twice as loud.
 
If it were a surround issue I would recommend checking that your sound card in the volume control>playback devices was showing 7.1 to the operating system.  If it is then Dolby headphone in headphone mode should give you reasonable surround sound so long as it suits you. Personally I didn't find Dolby headphone very good and moved to a Soundblaster Z which gave me better surround effect. But at least check you have it setup correctly.
 
 

There are two problems that are making reviews a bit problematic and its why gamergate happened.
 
1) The primary sources of reviews, the review sites we read and "trust" are mostly not trustworthy. They have a basic conflict of interest driven by needing free gear to drive content for their site and they can't bite the hand that feeds them. Companies can always find someone else so typically reviews are all positive. Its not even as bad as just being directly paid and sponsored without declaration (which also happens, Linus has done that a few times) which is illegal but very common but just a simple business conflict of interest. The company might also be sponsoring adverts on your site and you need those to survive.
 
Sometimes its as simple as reviewers not wanting to bash on a product that isn't final, this happens a lot with games. If you come across a bug and you are on pre release code you report it to the devs who assure you it will be fixed for release do you put it in the review (and be wrong on release day) or not (and its still there in the game). Its a bad situation so typically reviewers don't antagonise pre-emptively, which is why launch day reviews are usually missing important technical problems and those videos come later if the problem is bad enough. So waiting for the day 1 reviews isn't as good a strategy as many think it is.
 
The professional reviews we read aren't truthful for a variety of fundamental reasons and its the norm.
 
2) Amateur reviewers don't know what they are doing. They either have nothing to compare it to (most likely) but also they tend to review it too early in the purchase and rarely update the review unless something goes really badly wrong. A lot of reviewers have no idea what they are writing and so they just talk about fast shipping and being well wrapped but not about the product, so the grand majority of amateur reviews are kind of awful and don't get you anywhere. It isn't their fault, they don't have much to compare it with so if it works then they are happy but it might very well be the worst example in the marketplace and on Amazon that might make it 4.1 stars instead of 4.2 for the best.
 
Amateur reviews are also quite often paid for, I have been offered money multiple times to adjust reviews and get the product cheaper/free if only I could say a nice thing about it. I always insist that my initial issue still be in the review and also the subsequent review had been paid for (as is legally required) and hence I have never actually ended up adjusting it but I bet a lot of others have. Worse than that you have companies that do reviews for products to get them going on places like Amazon and so quite a large chunk of initial product reviews could very well just be fake. On other less ideal marketplaces you may even find the comments moderated to remove negative comments entirely.
 
So amateur reviews are usually garbage and when they aren't they are often fake or sponsored in some way and you can't trust the place publishing the comments as they choose what is on there. That makes good reviews with important details the minority overall.
 
 
We have never had it as bad for getting quality reviews as we do today. The move from print to the internet for reviews has been extremely problematic, with the customers now not funding the site at all and all the money coming from advertisers the model has changed and the review sites are basically just an extension of the marketing of the companies that make the products, only a handful of sites don't appear to do this regularly in one form or another (and I'll laugh if you think LTT is one of them because they got warned by the Canadian advertising standards agency just over a year ago). Amateurs are well amateurs and they are just as corruptible in different ways but usually don't know what to say.

There are two problems that are making reviews a bit problematic and its why gamergate happened.
 
1) The primary sources of reviews, the review sites we read and "trust" are mostly not trustworthy. They have a basic conflict of interest driven by needing free gear to drive content for their site and they can't bite the hand that feeds them. Companies can always find someone else so typically reviews are all positive. Its not even as bad as just being directly paid and sponsored without declaration (which also happens, Linus has done that a few times) which is illegal but very common but just a simple business conflict of interest. The company might also be sponsoring adverts on your site and you need those to survive.
 
Sometimes its as simple as reviewers not wanting to bash on a product that isn't final, this happens a lot with games. If you come across a bug and you are on pre release code you report it to the devs who assure you it will be fixed for release do you put it in the review (and be wrong on release day) or not (and its still there in the game). Its a bad situation so typically reviewers don't antagonise pre-emptively, which is why launch day reviews are usually missing important technical problems and those videos come later if the problem is bad enough. So waiting for the day 1 reviews isn't as good a strategy as many think it is.
 
The professional reviews we read aren't truthful for a variety of fundamental reasons and its the norm.
 
2) Amateur reviewers don't know what they are doing. They either have nothing to compare it to (most likely) but also they tend to review it too early in the purchase and rarely update the review unless something goes really badly wrong. A lot of reviewers have no idea what they are writing and so they just talk about fast shipping and being well wrapped but not about the product, so the grand majority of amateur reviews are kind of awful and don't get you anywhere. It isn't their fault, they don't have much to compare it with so if it works then they are happy but it might very well be the worst example in the marketplace and on Amazon that might make it 4.1 stars instead of 4.2 for the best.
 
Amateur reviews are also quite often paid for, I have been offered money multiple times to adjust reviews and get the product cheaper/free if only I could say a nice thing about it. I always insist that my initial issue still be in the review and also the subsequent review had been paid for (as is legally required) and hence I have never actually ended up adjusting it but I bet a lot of others have. Worse than that you have companies that do reviews for products to get them going on places like Amazon and so quite a large chunk of initial product reviews could very well just be fake. On other less ideal marketplaces you may even find the comments moderated to remove negative comments entirely.
 
So amateur reviews are usually garbage and when they aren't they are often fake or sponsored in some way and you can't trust the place publishing the comments as they choose what is on there. That makes good reviews with important details the minority overall.
 
 
We have never had it as bad for getting quality reviews as we do today. The move from print to the internet for reviews has been extremely problematic, with the customers now not funding the site at all and all the money coming from advertisers the model has changed and the review sites are basically just an extension of the marketing of the companies that make the products, only a handful of sites don't appear to do this regularly in one form or another (and I'll laugh if you think LTT is one of them because they got warned by the Canadian advertising standards agency just over a year ago). Amateurs are well amateurs and they are just as corruptible in different ways but usually don't know what to say.

The issue isn't so much the check but usually the update itself. You see a program can't replace itself while its running, so you need a separate process that is not overwritten to do the updating of the primary program and to do the updates when shutdown. This is the reason Firefox etc have those daemon processes running. All they do is pull down the version and check against the latest but they also await the program shutting down and replacing it.
 
Personally I think this ought to be in windows and its getting a bit ridiculous that every program has its own update system.

It might increase slightly, CPU's don't scale with clockspeed perfectly due to the memory latency and bandwidth not increasing proportionately, decreasing the clockspeed will produce marginally higher IPC.

It might increase slightly, CPU's don't scale with clockspeed perfectly due to the memory latency and bandwidth not increasing proportionately, decreasing the clockspeed will produce marginally higher IPC.

DX12 and Vulkan
Next years GPUs and especially HBM2
XPoint ReRAM
RX480/1060/1070/1080
Zen CPU generally
Auto driving cars
Deep learning
Macs
The upcoming consoles
Most modern games generally
Star Citizen
 
What isn't overhyped these days? That is the harder question.

Go with a 6-10 dollar USB DAC (USB Adapter). It will probably solve all your issues.
 
http://www.modmic.com/products/antlion-audio-usb-adapter
 
Or
 
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Adapter-Windows-AU-MMSA/dp/B00IRVQ0F8
 
Let me know if it works (you can always return things if it doesnt, so I say start cheap).

Over the last couple of years I have seen at least 2 sites test the claim that Nvidia gimps their driver. Both found a moderate improvement in performance of the card over time in the same games. So the latest drivers are the best. There is no "gimping" of old Nvidia cards, all the data says that is not true it is a false claim.

Bug fixes, new features. With that attitude you may as well just keep the release drivers, why 359.00?