Chris Fortune

Well I was able to pay Richer Sounds a visit and true to the expectation they were knowledgeable and had units to be tried out. In the end I opted for a set of Bowers and Wilkins Px7 S2s which fitted my head comfortably and gave me a sound that I am really enjoying. 

Well I was able to pay Richer Sounds a visit and true to the expectation they were knowledgeable and had units to be tried out. In the end I opted for a set of Bowers and Wilkins Px7 S2s which fitted my head comfortably and gave me a sound that I am really enjoying. 

Well I was able to pay Richer Sounds a visit and true to the expectation they were knowledgeable and had units to be tried out. In the end I opted for a set of Bowers and Wilkins Px7 S2s which fitted my head comfortably and gave me a sound that I am really enjoying. 

I have recently found out about Richer Sounds as in today and will be paying them a visit as soon as I have some time off. Good to hear they have demo units as that will likely help me nail down things way better than just talking about it. With that said thank you for the talking too

With the USB dongle included yes, the xbox version has dolby audio licences (PS doesn't, but dolby audio in headphones is kinda bad) have you been to any audio stores? I know that Richer sounds has a pretty good variety of headphones that they'll let you demo, along with carrying both versions of the Maxwell incase you decide to buy a pair and want a warranty.

I used it as I wished to retain much additional data not afforded by a new install and for me I did think it was worth the cost however I am not you so your balance may well be different. A new licence is around $10 - $15 often discounts are available too so it is effectively a $35ish cost for the convenience it offers. It does also have other useful tools included that you may wish to use not offered by a new install which may also be a consideration.

https://www.ubackup.com/ is the homepage and https://www.ubackup.com/download.html is the download options page
 
The free version has had the move the OS option removed sadly and the $45 price is not cheap for an effectively one use product but I found it to be a very simple piece of software to use and operation was remarkable fluid.

I would assume that if you are updating you SSD to a faster one you would ultimately prefer to have the OS on that one so why do twice. Once you have the new drive transfer it directly to that one maybe.
 
The method I used was the one demonstrated on JayzTwoCents a short while ago however it is no longer free as described presumably capturing the increased exposure to their product which was a very easy method. If requested I can link it. 

Right now I wouldn't buy anything as GPUS are the hardest and most overinflated part at the moment. I would recommend a GTX 1650 super or a gtx 1070. But right now I wouldn't buy anything. I don't know what kind of bottle necking your CPU would have with the 1070 tho.

How would you plan to upgrade the cpu and the gpu in a laptop?

With that kind of budget I would think you will be looking at a pretty high spec even if that includes the monitor. I would still take the start at the core approach and do the rest as convenient however I would wait till the next lake Intels are out unless you are already convinced about using AMD as even if those parts are not for you they may bring down prices on 10th gen. Whilst this is a great time to be upgrading from the point of view of all the new parts coming out that cycle hasn't quite finished yet so some patience which youu seem to have an abundance of might serve you well.

Replied build a new rig as to be honest any significant upgrade path you choose is going to be replacing many of the core components anyway. Re use and scavenge parts where you can.
 
Budget is also has a major impact on how you can proceed too so mentioning an approximate number would be useful.
 
The route I would take, Decide on the platform (Intel or AMD) and do the motherboard CPU and RAM first as all your other parts can be reused whilst the market settles. Then you can step by step upgrade as it becomes available/convenient to do so.

I think there is a balance, at some point it tips from the preserving the natural resources to reducing your energy footprint. Where that place lies will be very dependant on what you personally do. If you wanted to be very strict about it consoles, TVs and other purely entertainment technology would carry an additional penalty as there is no direct functional use for them. Home PC's may well fall there to but they do have a functional use too even if many do not heavily use them that way. Then you need to consider the recycling aspect too, can the item be recycled efficiently, reused in a different environment effectively. 
 
Short of falling back to an agrarian society and eschewing all but the essential technologies there will always be some waste, some way to be more efficient and as each of us has a different set of needs and wishes it is very difficult to set a standard for all or even one for ourselves alone as this balance point may change year on year as our situation changes. 
 
Personally I feel that being energy efficient without improving the technologies capacity for productive output is just as wasteful as upgrading without a productive reuse/recycling path.

It's a complex issue that has many variables, while energy consumption is an issue, it kinda depends on your location, for exemple here in my province, most of the electricity is made using renewables ... so the impact isn't the same as if the electricity was made from coal or gas burning.
 
But the point @Vishera made about upgradability and phones being glued shut is a good one, I think that's also a good reason for RTR laws and regulation.
 
I personally think throwing stuff out and getting new stuff when you don't NEED it is wasteful, I get that people want the latest and newest thing, but want and need are 2 different things, I would love to have a new PC with a 5800x and a 3080, but I don't NEED it! Same for my car, I would love to have the newest Outlander PHEV, but my current car is still going strong and only have maintenance to do on it, so I don't need it.

I worded it that way to suggest it was a step too far, as with most things there is a nessercary balance to be struck

I worded it that way to suggest it was a step too far, as with most things there is a nessercary balance to be struck

OOps, missed that but I hope the vid helped

If your wanting more performance in gaming, sell the existing card and buy a faster one. Multi-GPU's just dont work that well (or in many cases, at all) for gaming.
 
If you are wanting the second GPU for other reasons, say rendering workloads, VM's or other general compute applications, then sure you can fit what you like and they dont have to match so long as your software can utilise whatever you've installed.

First post ever, just thought I'd share one of my long-term projects with you guys. It's a complete sleeper xbox 360 (minus the front USB portion that broke off the front panel, still trying to find a replacement.) - There is 0 modification to the outside of the case except where the power, video, and USB cables come out the rear. Has two intake fans underneath the stock 360 HDD bay up top, and 1 exhaust fan at the rear. 
 
Powered by a Ryzen 4750G, and 16GB of 3000mhz memory, on an ASRock B550 ITX motherboard, and a 1tb wd sn750 for a boot / storage drive. Primarily use this when I go to LAN parties; or my main workstation is down for upgrades.
 
Extra details: The power button from the 360 DOES turn the PC on. The custom power supply cables were done by MB Custom Sleeving, you can find them on FB. This is the 5th version of hardware in this system, and I've slowly made refinements over the years. The original build log was on OCN.
 
 

Ok here we go with longer repeat runs
Fixed test conditions
Stock settings on GPU except fans fixed at 50%
Case fans fixed at 40% (This was too low I think as had excess variability in CPU scores)
 
Test runs consisted of 10 repeated runs of Time Spy, first on 1440p screen and then using 4K. No downtime between runs.
 
As expected from discussion there was some heat balancing over the initial runs but this quickly levelled out and after the initial 3-4 test runs temps followed a very consistent pattern. As there are lots of numbers here I will just report the second 5 results of each resolution run. These unlike previous numbers reported are GPU scores and not combined ones
 
1440P      18921   18900   18850   18937   18897   
4K            17880   17742   17704   17635   17742
 
As a sanity check I did a single 1440P run which yielded a 18945 immediately after the 4K runs.
 
Whilst doing these I remembered someone (after looking it up, Tikker ) mentioning that perhaps the rescaling a 1440P test to a 4K screen was having an effect so to see if I could get an indication of this I ran a single pair of Time Spy Extreme runs first at 1440P (9737 GPU score) and the at 4K (9390 GPU score) and whilst as single runs these are purely an indicative rather than definitive results it does not appear to be the case.
 
As a side note I would just like to thank anyone who produces hardware testing results for use to use as this was a complete pain in the butt and I never want to do it again, until something crops up that tweeks my interest

Maybe China is using too much of your bandwidth spying
 
 
 
Note, this is 2020 and also a joke

Benchmarking software will report generated fps rather than displayed fps so will probably not give too much info

Just in case you missed something this vid seems to go through everything with the onscreen menu
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NubpG62TP_k
 
Small you tuber so took a while to find but he seems pretty thorough

Bit more expensive thanks to the b550 mobo.
Also you don't need a windows key.
  PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor $319.00 @ Umart Motherboard MSI B550-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard $216.70 @ Newegg Australia Memory Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory $135.60 @ Device Deal Storage Crucial P1 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive $78.00 @ Skycomp Technology Storage Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive $85.80 @ Newegg Australia Video Card EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB KO GAMING Video Card $498.00 @ Device Deal Case Phanteks Eclipse P300A Mesh ATX Mid Tower Case $99.00 @ PCCaseGear Power Supply Antec NeoECO Gold ZEN 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply $119.00 @ JW Computers Monitor AOC G2490VX 23.8" 1920x1080 144 Hz Monitor $179.00 @ JW Computers   Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts     Total $1730.10   Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-12-31 22:08 AEDT+1100   Just saw you needed a monitor.

Looks like a Molex to me