Tag: Gamestation

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.

New personal gamestation!

Beside a new devbox that I talked about setting up, now that I no longer pay for the tinderbox I also decided to buy myself a new PC for playing games (so Windows-bound, unfortunately), replacing Yamato that has been serving me well for years at this point.

Given we’ve talked about this at the office as well, I’ll write down the specs over here, with the links to Amazon (where I bought the components), as I know a fair number of people are always interested to know specs. I will probably write down some reviews on Amazon itself as well as on the blog, for the components that can be discussed “standalone”.

  • CPU: Intel i7 5930K, hex-core Haswell-E; it was intended as a good compromise between high performance and price, not only for gaming but also for Adobe Lightroom.
  • Motherboard: Asus X99-S
  • Memory: Crucial Ballistix 32GB (8GBx4) actually this one I ordered from Crucial directly, because the one I originally ordered on Amazon UK was going to ship from Las Vegas, which meant I had to pay customs on it. I am still waiting for that one to be fully cancelled, but then Crucial was able to deliver an order placed on Wednesday at 10pm by Friday, which was pretty good (given that this is a long weekend in Ireland.)
  • Case: Fractal Design Define R5 upon suggestion of two colleagues, one who only saw it in reviews, the other actually having the previous version. It is eerily quiet and very well organized; it would also fit a huge amount of storage if I needed to build a new NAS rather than a desktop PC.
  • CPU cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 I went with water cooling for the CPU because I did not like the size of the copper fins in the other alternatives of suggested coolers for the chosen CPU. Since this is a completely sealed system it didn’t feel too bad. The only shaky part is that the only proper space for this to fit into the case is on the top-front side, and it does require forcing the last insulation panel in a little bit.

Now you probably notices some parts missing; the reason is that I have bought a bunch of components to upgrade Yamato over the past year and a half since being employed also means being able to just scratch your itch for power more easily, especially if you, like me, are single and not planning a future as a stock player. Some of the updates are still pretty good and others are a bit below average now, and barely average when I bought it, but I think it might be worth listing them still.

  • SSD: Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial M550, both 1TB. The reason for having two different ones is because the latter (which was the first of the two) was not available when I decided to get a second one, and the reason to get a second one was because I realized that while keeping pictures on the SSD helped a lot, the rest of the OS was still too slow…
  • GPU: Asus GeForce GTX660 because I needed something good that didn’t cost too much at the time.
  • PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 1200W which I had to replace when I bought the graphics card, as the one I had before didn’t have the right PCI-E power connectors, or rather it had one too few. Given that Yamato is a Dual-Quad Opteron, with registered ECC memory, I needed something that would at least take 1kW; I’m not sure how much it’s consuming right now to be honest.

We’ll see how it fares once I have it fully installed and started playing games on it, I guess.