General computer talk/advice

Not a bad little setup you have, I run a pair of Wharfedale Triton 3's off a Yamaha CR620 I rebuilt a while back, Has plenty of power for me and I love the Yamaha "Natural sound" basically a completely flat EQ and very low crossover distortion, from what I've found, amp's with high THD tend to sound warm and wolly and amps with low THD sound very clear and sterile. Amps with cap coupled outputs like the early solid state stuff sound very warm and "Cozy" where as later direct coupled amp's sound very clear and cold. Amp design has a pretty significant impact on sound but by far speakers obviously make the most difference, you could have a pair of loudspeakers with 12" woofers with tiny magnets and cheap tweeters and they'd sound boomey, farty and just overall crappy. Where as a nice pair of loudspeakers with nice beefy magnets on the woofers, dedicated mid range drivers and nice silk dome tweeters or even horns will sound great.

 

My keyboard for my PC is in that layout too. I just got used to it after a while. Only OEM stuff, guys.

 

For the cost and space required this is really nice, palm size amp and performs as well as entry level true HiFi amps when using normal listening volume, sure it is only 2x50W + 1x50W, which something like 4/5 is really usable without loosing sound quality, but in a small room seems to be enough.
Kinda wanted to get used Yamaha high end amp, but those are quite big and still at used cost would of been over 200, while TPA was around 50.

There is a lot of info about TPA3116 on net, which I figured out after ordering the amp, it is surprisingly good for what it is.

Built speakers before and wasn't really happy with them when run with old big HiFi amp, but they woke up alive with TPA, finally I could actually make up what they said in tutorial videos it was kind of having VGA resolution and moving to 4K or something, I guess even amps get bad with age.

I made speakers myself (I have own little sawmill, so cut down trees, made some planks, truly self made made), bought elements online shopping offers, so total cost of system was no more than ~300, every game and song got transformed to completely new level, really recommend for anyone that looks for budget solution to somewhat decent sound.

Maybe some used quality speakers, enclosed car sub and such would be good route with TPA that would give a lot of sound for the money, especially in car sims you get lot better experience with sub that can move some air, Arma, Battlefield, OFP also gets to somewhat new level.

If I would play in city apartment, then I would of gone to DAC + headphones route. Subwoofer in apartment complex is sure way to get into trouble.

I could put DAC to current system too, it might be improvement over this Realtec ALC1150, but currently I'm happy with the setup as after having mostly just all sorts of computer speaker setups most of the years it is really great experience.

 

Never really felt the need for a woofer in my system, the 8" drivers in my Wharfedales reach low enough for my taste, as for amps sounding crappier with age, that's down to the electrolytic capacitors inside them, as they age the electrolytes dry out and the capacitors start getting high ESR and drifting in value which can cause sloppy bass or very shrill screechy highs along with just a general overall muddy sound. My Yamaha being over 40 years old was well due a "recap" so now it's got all new Panasonic low ESR FC capacitors in it, along with a few new small signal transistors that had gotten hissy with age. I also took the liberty to upgrade the big filter capacitors which helps with fast pace low's such as bass guitars and the like in metal and rock just sounds less confused and muddled together. Tighter and punchier bass. Just provides that extra bit of reserve power.

 

Woofer is not so much for hearing, more for feeling sound trough body, mine is actually under the bed, but it is not possible to hear where it is, when using bit more volume there is this thump in chest though. Not sure if that is really needed though, but it is different from speaker's bass and I got massaging bed quite cheaply

I would describe it so that it is one thing to hear that grenade explode, another to feel it to explode, woofer with it's large movement moves more air and thus creates this different effect, but of course if there is enough movement in drivers, it should give similar experience.

I'm not always even keeping woofer on really, so it is not always needed, however it has uses and of course makes setting up system bit more complicated. If sub overpowers cabinets, then things sound really bad again, so balance is key in there, especially when listening music.

Sub can be also problematic with car game if for example engine sounds are made without testing with sub, there can easily be low 'boom' kind of sound at idle, which becomes annoying really fast, so it is not always best thing to have, however there is separate volume control for it so easy to silence it.

It is worth to try if you get the chance though as with everything trying out more of things gives better picture.

 

My Logitech Z5500's are due for some new capacitors. Mostly because they came pre installed with naff ones from the factory xD
Some people on audio forums have swapped them out and say that it makes a big difference to the sound. So that seems like an interesting idea to me. The only thing holding me back is that it is quite a big job to order all the right capacitors and swap them all out. Especially on a set of speakers as mediocre as mine.

My biggest issue with the speaker system is that it produces a constant high pitch whine. I have tried relocating the cables to see if it was caused by interference and it is not. I also checked the soundcard too and the issue is happening within the speakers. How to debug that sort of issue outside of replacing every component within the speakers one at a time is somewhat beyond my current electronics capability.

 

Capacitors don't really change the sound unless you change their values, some people think that different brand caps produce a different sound, these people also spend 5K on speaker cables...

Found the limit's of my 3570k 4.6GHz @ 1.3v vcore.

 

dun dun dun, my phone is updating to Nougat, hopefully it doesnt brick itself,

why is your CPU socket so cold, and why is there a temp sensor there, like what use is it to know the CPU socket (unless passive cooling) like it is 50c cooler than your cores.

 

That is nice, what are your Cinebech scores? I would guess it goes over 190 in single core test as that likes from overclock?

Something called Xeon 3000 overclocked seems to be at many places fastest thing, but some have those insane 7-8Ghz overclocks, I have only 161 in Cinebench and what I really would like is something around 250 or more, so have to wait CPU technology to evolve bit more I guess.

 

That is bit less than I thought, but certainly good number still, that is great thing about K-models, you can get bit more out from them. In practice you will have i7-6700 performance level in Beam, multi core is of course faster with i7-6700, but it is not doing anything more until adding several cars.

 

Uhhh, I think that's a pretty good if not great score for a 4 generation old quad core... lol

 

Decided to join in on the Cinebench fun.

Almost matched you on the single core xD

Done the tests on the laptop now too, still waiting for the Atom tablet to unzip it...


Well, turns out Cinebench is 64bit only, so the tablet won't even run it... I think the Windows 10 single core zip decompression images gives the picture well though

 

That is great score for 2500k I think, is that max clocks it will do?

I think those just show how little single core performance has increased during the years, it is almost none. Kaby Lake i7 will do around 190 and overclocked some more, Skylake i7-6700K was around 175 I guess, so for me that is really point of Kaby Lake, however it is still quite small improvement, not sure what overclocked Kaby would do, but I guess still not 250 which I would think being enough fast for me.

Hopefully CPU wars will get things moving again and we start to see single core performance finally moving seriously up!

 

At voltages I am happy to run at on a stable daily PC pretty much, maybe there is an extra 100mhz in there for someone who is skilled at overclocking. However there is still voltage headroom left on the CPU, I haven't tested whether it will do more though.

Its currently running at 4.4Ghz, a lot of people seem to target 4.5Ghz for their daily PC on this CPU.

However my sig is enough to show that this CPU hasn't had an easy life. I honestly have no idea how the PCIe gen 2 lanes cope with all that stuff without any noticeable performance hit. This computer is also running 1.65v ram as well come to think of it.

 

I had to back down to 4.5GHz after a BSOD playing Beam. I could keep 4.6 but at this point I have to start dumping Vcore at it.

 

My CPU does really well in Cnebench, don't have the single core display option though afaik.

Anyway I'm more than happy with just shy of 1700cb

http://i.imgur.com/KTMi4FK.jpg

 

Click file then advanced or something along those lines.

 

"Genuine Intel CPU 0000" Seems legit.

 

From other thread I watched a video of Ryzen running 4.2Ghz overclock, it had Cinebench single core result of 166, multi core result of 1851 which surely is impressive and it run at 80C.

That single core result is not very good for that overclock, maybe some other testers have gotten better single core results? I think stock clocks it was 156 or something like that.

Of course 166 is still enough fast for most of the time, but it starts to look like that it is multi core performance and in BeamNG those multiple vehicle situations where it shines at best, if playing with single car Kaby i5 overclocked might be best performance for the dollar right now.

Any new BeamNG version might of course change that.
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I think that might be because he is running Xeon according to his sig.