New, new gamestation

Full disclosure: the following posts has a significantly higher amount of Amazon Affiliates links than usual. That’s because I am talking about the hardware I just bought, and this post counts just as much as an update on my hardware as a recommendation on the stuff I bought, I have not gotten hacked or bought out by anyone.

As I noted in my previous quick update, my gamestation went missing in the move. I would even go as far as to say that it was stolen, but I have no way to prove whether it was stolen by the movers or during the move. This meant that I needed to get a new computer for my photo editing hobby, which meant more money spent, and still no news from the insurance. But oh well.

As for two years ago, I wanted to post here the current hardware setup I have. You’ll notice a number of similarities with the previous configuration, because I decided to stick as much as possible to what I had before, that worked.

• CPU: Intel Core i7 7820X, which still has a nice 3.6GHz base clock, and has more cores than I had before.
• Motherboard: MSI X299 SLI PLUS. You may remember that I had problems with the ASUS motherboard.
• Memory: 8×Crucial 16GB DDR4.
• Case: Fractal Design Define S, as I really like the designs of Fractal Design (pun not intended), and I do not need the full cage or the optical disk bays for sure this time around.
• CPU cooler: NZXT Kraken X52, because the 280mm version appears to be more aimed towards extreme overclockers than my normal usage; this way I had more leeway on how to mount the radiator in.
• SSD: 2×Crucial MX300 M.2 SATA. While I liked the Samsung 850 EVO, the performance of the MX300 appear to be effectively the same, and this allowed me to get the M2 version, leaving more space if I need to extend this further.
• HDD: Toshiba X300 5TB because there is still need for spinning rust to archive data that is “at rest”.
• GPU: Zotac GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11GB, because since I’m spending money I may just as well buy a top of the line card and be done with it.
• PSU: Corsair RM850i, for the first time in years betraying beQuiet! as they didn’t have anything in stock at the time I ordered this.

This is the configuration in the chassis, but that ended up not being enough. In particular, because of my own stupidity, I ended up having to replace my beloved Dell U2711 monitor. I really like my UltraSharp, but earlier this year I ended up damaging the DisplayPort input on it — friends don’t let friends use DisplayPort with hooks on them! Get those without for extra safety, particularly if you have monitor arms or standing desks! Because of this I have been using a DVI-D DualLink cable instead. Unfortunately my new videocard (and most new videocard I could see) do not have DVI ports anymore, preferring instead multiple DisplayPort and (not even always) HDMI output. The UltraSharp, unfortunately, does not support 2560×1440 output over HDMI, and the DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter in the box is only for SingleLink DVI, which is not fast enough for that resolution either. DualLink DVI adapters exist, but for the most part they are “active” converters that require a power supply and more cables, and are not cheap (I have seen a “cheap” one for £150!)

I ended up buying a new monitor too, and I settled for the BenQ BL2711U, a 27 inches, 4k, 10-bit monitor “for designers” that boasts a 100% sRGB coverage. This is not my first BenQ monitor; a few months ago I bought a BenQ BL2420PT, a 24 inches monitor “for designers” that I use for both my XPS and for my work laptop, switching one and the other as needed over USB-C, and I have been pretty happy with it altogether.

Unfortunately the monitor came with DisplayPort cables with hooks, once again, so at first I decided to connect it over HDMI instead. And that was a big mistake, for multiple reasons. The first is that calibrating it with the ColorMunki was showing a huge gap between the colours uncalibrated and calibrated. The second was that, when I went to look into it, I could not enable 10-bit (10 bpc) mode in the NVIDIA display settings.

Repeat after me: if you want to use a BL-series BenQ monitor for photography you should connect it using DisplayPort.

The two problems were solved after switching to DisplayPort (temporarily with hooks, and ordered a proper cable already): 10bpc mode is not available over HDMI when using 4k resolution and 60Hz. HDMI 2 can do 4k and 10-bit (HDR) but only at lower framerate, which makes it fine for watching HDR movies and streaming, but not good for photo editing. The problem with the calibration was the same problem I noticed, but couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to fix, on my laptops: some of the gray highlighting of text would not actually be visible. For whatever reason, BenQ’s “designer” monitors ship with the HDMI colour range set to limited (16-235) rather than full (0-255). Why did they do that? I have no idea. Indeed switching the monitor to sRGB mode, full range, made the calibration effectively unnecessary (I still calibrated it out of nitpickery), and switching to DisplayPort removes the whole question on whether it should use limited or full range.

While the BenQ monitors have fairly decent integrated speakers, which make it unnecessary to have a soundbar for hearing system notifications or chatting with my mother, that is not the greatest option to play games on. So I ended up getting a pair of Bose Companion 2 speakers which are more than enough for what I need to use them for.

Now I have an overly powerful computer, and a very nice looking monitor. How do I connect them to the Internet? Well, here’s the problem: the Hyperoptic socket is in the living room, way too far from my computer to be useful. I could have just put a random WiFi adapter on it, but I also needed a new router anyway, since the box with my fairly new Linksys also got lost in the moving process.

So upon suggestion from a friend, and a recommendation from Troy Hunt I ended up getting a UAP-AC-PRO for the living room, and a UAP-AC-LITE for the home office, topped it with an EdgeRouter X (the recommendation of which was rescinded afterwards, but it seems to do its job for now), and set them as a bridge between the two locations. I think I should write down networking notes later, but Troy did that already so why bother?

So at the end of this whole thing I spent way more money on hardware than I planned to, I got myself a very new nice computer, and I have way too many extra cables than I need, plus the whole set of odds and ends of the old computer, router and scanner that are no longer useful (I still have the antennas for the router, and the power supply for the scanner). And I’m still short of the document scanner, which is a bit of a pain because I now have a collection of documents that need scanning. I could use the office’s scanners, but those don’t run OCR for the documents, and I have not seen anything decent to apply OCR to PDFs after the fact, I’m open to suggestions as I’m not sure I’m keen on ending up buying something like the EPSON DS-310 just for the duplex scanning and the OCR software.