[Rant] My new year gadget buying resolutions

It's new year folks!!! The year 2014. Year 2013 came and went really fast. But a lot of things happened during that year. Affairs in the personal life are outside of the scope of this blog. This is all about tech.

I bought a lot of gadgets as well.

• Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD
• Replaced the mouse because it broke (why?)
• Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet. Sold it though.
• Asus Transformer Book T100 tablet
• iPhone 5S 16GB Space Grey
• Best air cooler in the world to cool the CPU - Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme
• New display. QNIX QX2710 from South Korea. 2560x1440 of glory
• Haswell!!! Core i7 4770K CPU + Maximus VI Hero motherboard
• Leap Motion controller which I hardly use anymore
• Audiotechnica ATH-AD500X headphones

 

Man, that's a lot of money. Sure, some of them were bought by selling the old gadgets. So it's not a huge expenditure. Still, I think I could have saved quite a sum if I made the right choices at certain times. For example, I should have waited on the Tablet. I should have kept the 2600K CPU. The headphones – the Roccat Kaves were too much. Should not have bought the Leap Motion controller as well.

 

So what's it going to be this year? I already have a list.

• New camera: Canon 70D + 18-135mm IS STM lens kit
• New video card: AMD Radeon R9 290 (custom cooled) or GTX 780 or GTX 870/880 (Maxwell)
• New mouse: Logitech G602 wireless gaming mouse
• New keyboard: Logitech G710+ mechanical gaming keyboard

 

I’m still not sure if I should get the Canon 70D. The camera itself is amazing, but if I cannot put it into proper use, it would be a lot of money spent badly. The darn thing costs $1260 as of today. I don’t think the prices would go down any time soon. Usually the prices hold their ground until a new model comes out. But considering the fact that Canon doesn’t put out new semi-pro or pro cameras every year, I guess the price will hold. So waiting any longer is not the wise thing to do if I am solid on the purchase. I’m still trying to learn the S95 camera and I have learned a lot of things in the last few days.

 

[Rant] The ghosts in the machine

Last Friday I had an appointment at 4:30pm and I had to leave work early. I was hoping to setup the PC to carry out a coverage test before I left the office. The test takes quite a long time as the data set is large, so it would be great if I could run it while I'm not seated in front of the PC. For the coverage test we were using BullsEye Code Coverage Analyzer. You have to build the source with the BullsEye Build enable in Visual Studio. It then creates a coverage file and when you run the application using the test data set, it will update the file with the coverage information. Then you can open the coverage file from the Coverage Browser to see which functions and conditions were hit and which were not hit.

We have to build two solutions. The first one went through fine. But the second one took a long time to finish. In fact, it took so long that I gave it up and left the office because it was getting too late. Such a thing would never happen if I was not in a hurry. Funny thing is that the PC took the joke so far that it didn’t finish building the solution even by the time I arrived at the office on Monday!!!

Why does these weird things always happen when you are in a hurry? WHY??

Finally found an online store in Japan which sells all the highend aircoolers

If you had been following my blog for a while, you should know that I am very unhappy about my current CPU cooler, the CNPS9900MAX. 

Here's why. This cooler doesn't cool my Intel Core i7 2600K which is overclocked to 4.5GHz (1.32V) adequately at full fan speed. It reaches over 80C when I stress test using Prime95. On top of that poor performance, the noise is intolerable at full speed of the fan. I am running it at a low RPM of 1000, I stead of the maximum of 1700RPM. This means the CPU runs even hotter. Of course I don't run stress tests all the time, and there is no reason to run it at all because in fixed to this overclock. But when I play games and transcode videos (eg: gameplay footages to upload to YouTube), the temps of the CPU reach 80C after a while. That is not good. 80C is fine for stress testing but it should not hit 70C while doing even the demanding day to day tasks. The only advantage of having this cooler is that it fits my case without any issues, especially with the monstrous and needless tall heat sinks of the Corsair Vengeance memory. 

So, I've been looking around for the good coolers that's available in Japan and I found that the only thing that is listed on kakaku.com which fitted my criteria was Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E (and the Extreme version of it at a slightly higher price.) The difference was only the CFM of the fans and hence the noise. The extreme version is significantly louder than the original version. But it cools much better at that ridiculously high fan speed. I checked around if it at least fitted the case and people are saying it does, even though the max height of the cooler supported by the Raven RV03 case is 163mm and this cooler is 165mm tall. And, if I move the front fan to the back as a pull fan, I can fit it without removing the heat sinks on my memory. Win. 

I couldn't find the Noctua NH-D14 which is almost identical to the Silver Arrow but works better with high heat and the current king of the air coolers, the Phanteks PH-TC14PE on kakaku.com. Shame! The Phanteks doesn't fit y case because it reaches 170mm high, but the Noctua does. Noctua has better build quality, plus, it is easier to install than the Silver Arrow. The other option was to get a self contained water cooler like the H80i or H100i. But they only cool well with high fan speeds, and I won't be able to tolerate that a bit. I will definitely have to run the fans on those at lowest and that would undoubtedly cripple the performance. 

So I had come to the conclusion that the only option I had was the Silver Arrow until I just did a google search for the Phanteks. I came across a Japanese store called OLIO.SPEC. And guess what? They have the NH-D14 and many other cool gadgets including the highly praised Noctua fans. 

Here are the prices.

NH-D14: ¥9,980

Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme: ¥8,990

Phanteks PH-TC14PE: ¥12,900

Sure, the prices aren't cheap, but at least they are available if you want. So that's good. I'm sure there are more stores that don't get indexed up on kakaku.com. I should use google more than kakaku in the future. BTW, you can get a Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme for ¥8,563.