PC Accessories
If PC components are not your thing, perhaps some PC adjacent stuff! The following are some suggestions for useful stocking stuffers or gifts that the recipient can add to their tech toolkit and make their digital life a bit easier!
iKross USB 3.0 Multifunction SD card reader – $7.99, Amazon
Looking for a cheap and useful stocking stuffer? iKross has a SD and Micro SD card reader with a full-size USB 3.0 (or Type-C) on one end and a Micro USB port on the other end for connecting to your PC at home and your phone on the go. If you know someone that takes a lot of photos, this would be a great gift for them to make getting their photos off their camera, backed up, and posted to their social media.
APC Back-UPS Pro 1000VA UPS Battery Backup – $122, Amazon
As something I would put into the nice to have but probably would not buy for myself category, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can be a handy accessory to provide your PC and other electronics with clean power that can allow you to finish out your gaming session or even just give you enough time to save your college final paper and shut down the computer should the power go out.
Inateck USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay Hard Drive Docking Station – $38, Amazon
An external drive dock can be extremely useful for the family PC technician in your life! Having an external dock makes it a much simpler process to backup up client computers and troubleshoot drives that family and friends might bring you to pull data off. It can also make upgrading their storage to a larger drive easier by offering offline / in the field cloning abilities that do not require a host PC to run. Some docks even allow RAID though I would not advise going that route. Instead, look for the drives that offer cloning (in many cases this is an either/or choice though some higher end models include both features and let you choose). Check out our review of the Inateck dual bay 2.5"/3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 dock which Allyn found worked well.
man the whole guide is
man the whole guide is expensive
Hey! I did put that $16
Hey! I did put that $16 infrared thermometer in there! 🙂
One of my picks was free! hah
One of my picks was free! hah
Ryan has been recommending
Ryan has been recommending more and more premium priced “things” over time :).
Podcast 149 (April 2011) – “Amazon Cloud Drive” (pretty cheap)
Podcast 150 – Free application for Android
Podcast 153 – used underwear “His lawyers briefs”
Podcast 250 or so – newspapers “papers”
Podcast 426 – $500 phablet
(Yes these are cherry picked for fun 🙂 )
Shadow Warrior 2 is a
Shadow Warrior 2 is a fantastic game, definitely agree with the recommendation. On my top five games list for 2016 for sure.
It was a hard choice between
It was a hard choice between that and Doom, but I love me some Lo Wang. The one liners and fact that it doesn't take itself very seriously reminds me of Duke Nukem and Serious Sam…
Shadow Warrior 2 is also the
Shadow Warrior 2 is also the first PC game to support HDR. The announcement came from NVIDIA, but I’ve was thinking of picking it up to see if I could view HDR from my RX480 to Vizio TV. Besides SW2 I can’t seem to find a way to test or view HDR content from PC. Microsoft/Netflix made an announcement last month, but you have to have a Kaby Lake processor or (maybe?) a NVIDIA 1XXX series card. Sigh, DRM.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/10/13/shadow-warrior-2/
Why not promote the Fury X
Why not promote the Fury X that is on sale for $299 at newegg and amazon (and probably other online shops) ?
In the Division it delivers 83% of the GTX 1080 performance for less then HALF the price. (and its quieter)
I’m mentioning this because The Division is a forecaster of performance for many future titles…
It’s not a bad deal, but I
It's not a bad deal, but I will say this: every time I plug in my Fury X here to do some testing, I am annoyed at the noise and sound that card makes…
Its true that you cant judge
Its true that you cant judge noise just from a db level, its characteristics also matters.
For example I can listen to the entire “four seasons” at 80db, but I would probably go “death” after 5 minute of skrylex.
I will know soon enough if the pump noise/coil whine is a problem in my case. (Corsair Carbide 330R)
For the noise, I can hear the
For the noise, I can hear the pump when the case is open and when I put my ear close. But otherwise, closed case and ambient noise made this the quiet video card I ever owned.
But, at idle, in the middle of the night, I think I could hear the pump. In contrast the H100 pump seem quieter… So not sure why the Fury X pump is audible, but the H100 is not.
The coil noise doesn’t seem worse of better then many GPU I used since the 8800GTS.
The noise is not my issue with the Fury X (Or performance)
But the heat sink is massive and “uncomfortably” fit even in my full ATX case. And the tubing is very stiff.
So all in all, I think the $170 4GB RX 480 is a much better all around deal. Its probably THE best GPU at the moment, even at $200
I ordered nvidia gtx 1080 🙂
I ordered nvidia gtx 1080 🙂