The most advanced GoPro yet, a system powerful enough to game at 4K 60fps, and a beautiful pair of ear-huggers
Well, well, well. What is it I yearn for? The world's best action camera, a new PC setup that would make most of the PC enthusiast community weep, and the perfect headphones for my travel adventures across the planet. Yeah, I could totally afford these, maybe, if I took out several loans, and sold my sister's kidney.
GoPro Hero 4 Black
I'm going to admit right now, my two great loves in life: technology and extreme sports—not particularly in that order. So, when the two merge, it creates an almost harmonious symphony of joy in my head. I'm a trail rider, that's what I do. I take a bike, usually with better suspension than most cars, cycle or push it all the way to the top of a large hill, mountain, or cliff top, in dense deciduous forest, then begin my descent downward at velocities that make many of the uninitiated wince.
Or at least, I think they'd wince, if they could actually see it clearly. As you can imagine, GoPros really are my jam. A GoPro is a fantastic piece of hardware, whether it's the Hero 4 Black running a stunning 4K 30fps or the far more affordable Silver trucking in 1920x1440. Both of them are great feats of micro-engineering, without which we wouldn't have the diverse and all encompassing action cam market, or footage for that matter, that we have today. Who'd have thought these tiny little cameras would have ever been this popular? Everybody and their dog has one. Could you imagine missing out on Felix Baumgartner launching himself out of that balloon for the first time?
That said, there are two things that irritate me about my current action cam, the GoPro Hero 3 White, and both of them relate to my other love, technology. Primarily, the desire for a higher frame rate and a better resolution. Undoubtedly, right now the sweet spot for us PC enthusiasts is 2560x1440. The screens are cheap, they're crammed into phones, laptops, and desktop monitors, and to be quite frank, 60fps at that resolution is pretty stunning.
Frame rates particularly are becoming such a problem for me that I can't happily watch a film at the cinema any more without seeing an intense amount of motion blur. All in thanks to that ever-stuttering 24fps directors seem to obsess over. Get out of the way, Quentin Tarantino, I have no time for your "all film, no digital" nonsense. Give me higher frame rates, less motion blur, and smoother sequences, that's all I care about. Damn you, 144Hz monitors, you've ruined my cinema-going experience!
What I'd love to do is get my hands on a GoPro Hero 4 Black edition. That would definitely sate my desire for higher resolution, higher frame rate filming. Annoyingly, GoPro hasn't settled on the generic screen size standards just yet. 2.7K? What on earth is that? But at the very least, that is a resolution I could record 60fps with, and then shrink it down to 1440p. Unfortunately, it's hardly a cheap solution to my resolution woes, and if I wanted to satisfy my burning desire for this monumental image-capturing beauty, I'd be sinking an easy $500 into it. Not including any accessories, such as that GoPro dog harness I so desire for my chubby fuzzy companion.
What I can do with the GoPro Hero 4 Black that I couldn't do before?
Record all of my hard-earned, sweaty, downhill descents through dense forest and mountains in a solid enough quality that warrants watching and uploading to the Internet. It'd also be great for vlogging and any of the YouTube work I'll be doing going forward. It's small, light, portable, and I can attach it to a stick.
Custom Water-cooled Parvum Systems ATX X99 Build
This may come as a surprise, but I do not have a gaming rig at home currently. Alas, I moved over to work in our Bath offices earlier this year from the back end of nowhere in England. I travel light, and don't drive, and because of that I have had to give my beloved system away to a family member. For the time being, I game on an Asus laptop (Intel Core-i7, 8GB RAM, and a GTX 840M) plugged directly into an Asus PG278Q 27" G-Sync monitor. A far cry from the Geforce GTX 660 Ti, 16GB of RAM, and Intel Core i5-2500K I was using before. I'm in dire need of a new rig.
So, then, what am I after particularly? Well, as any system builder will tell you, when planning a new rig, it all comes down to what you're going to be using it for. After all, if all you're going to do is play Minecraft all day, there's no point buying a 5960X and three Titan Xs. You may as well be throwing money into the fire at that point. So, I need to identify what it is I want to do. I've got a pretty fine list of criteria this new mini-dream machine needs to reach. I'm an avid overclocker. I'll be rendering video and live streaming occasionally. I want to game on either a 3440x1440 monitor at 60fps or 2560x1440 at 144fps. I love silent PCs. I need the speed that Samsung brings with their latest M.2 NVMe PCIe drives. And I'd like to build a clean, aesthetically pleasing, fully water-cooled, hard-piped system.
System Specs
- CPU: Intel Core i7-5930K
- GPU: 2x EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked ACX 2.0+
- MOBO: Asus Sabertooth X99
- RAM: 32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum 2400MHz
- PSU: Corsair 1500 AXi
- SSD: Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB
- Case: Parvum M1.0
At this point, you can imagine I'm looking directly at the X99 platform. I want to take advantage of the Asus X99 TUF Sabertooth, mostly because it looks stunning, it's an overclocking monster, and I can hide an M.2 drive under the armor. I'd also like to throw 32GB worth of Corsair DDR4 memory in there. Not so fussed on frequency, as it really doesn't add much to performance. Two Geforce GTX 980 Tis would be my next step. I've had particular fun using EVGA's latest batch of Superclocked ACX 2.0+ variants, so they'd probably be my first port of call. And to top it all off, I'd definitely grab myself an Intel Core i7-5930K. I'm sorry, I'm just not willing to break the bank and hop on the i7-5960X train, even if money was no object. And besides, I've always been a fan of the B-Team anyway. 980 Tis, i5s, yes, please, I'll hang out with the underdogs and melt the faces of those pro components at half the cost anyway. I would opt for the 5820K, it's a fine core, no doubt, but the extra PCIe lanes available to the 5930K will come in handy, ensuring I don't saturate that PCIe bus with all of this lane-hogging hardware.
As far as cases are concerned, I've been following a UK-based custom manufacturer for some time now. You've probably heard of them: Parvum Systems. If not, go take a look at the Titanfall water-cooled system that James Walter put together and that'll give you a solid idea as to what they do. In short, think of them as a British, acrylic, Case Labs. That being said, I'm waiting with bated breath for Parvum's full ATX chassis to be launched, god knows they've teased us enough with it. Then it's just a simple case of ordering a custom one, extending the chassis out by 120mm, reversing the layout, and inverting the motherboard tray to make sense with my room and desk orientation. Then I'd throw the lot under water with nickel-plated copper tubing to give it some proper pizazz, a hefty overclock, and plenty of performance later and wham, any game on an ultrawide resolution at max settings and 60fps. Man, do I want that. A boy can dream, right?
What I can do with this behemoth of a system that I couldn't do before?
Play games beyond a stuttering Diablo 3 and a grainy World of Warcraft, and actually have something to do on weekends and in the evening that doesn't involve staring at a tiny 17-inch screen with awful graphics. I could also do some Twitch streaming, general YouTube work at home, play Ark, and of course, prepare myself for the hype train that will be WoW's next expansion, Legion.
Sennheiser Momentum G Black (M2)
There's one more thing I'd love to have in my tech-driven life right now, and that's a decent pair of over-ear stereo headphones. I travel a lot, to events down in London, hardware conventions in Europe, and beyond that. Hell, I even have a bad habit of having family over in New Zealand, and that's a journey that can take anywhere from 32–54 hours from the UK (no joke). So having a comfortable solid set of headphones is no laughing matter. It's almost a must. Certainly for journeys like that.
I used to have a set of Steelseries 5H V3s. They were almost the perfect set of headphones for me. They were detachable, broke down into individual components, and came with a multitude of adapters depending on whether I wanted to use them on my personal rig, plug into in-flight entertainment, or just ram them into my phone. They didn't even look too garish for a gaming headset; I could wear them out in public without much fear, thanks in part to a graceful design style and also a nifty little favorite of mine, the retractable microphone. The sound quality was pretty solid as well, not too bass heavy, yet just enough treble and mids to keep my keen musician ears happy. Unfortunately, after a year and a half of wear and tear, they died a tragic death. And even with all the soldering and will power I could muster, eventually, the headset just wasn't worth saving.
In come the new, vastly more expensive, Sennheiser Momentum G (M2) in black. For me, possibly one of the best pairs of travel headphones out there. Yes, they come with a price tag, a fairly hefty one in fact, of $350. And yes, they're not much use anywhere else, but that's not what this purchase is about. I want these for travel, and that's it. Thanks to the brushed stainless steel, stunning leather covering, memory foam padding, and closed circumaural design of the ear cups, the Momentum Gs are possibly the best traveling headphones I could ever imagine. They're comfortable, compact, and run off a single 3.5mm stereo jack, making them ideal for all those times I want to be incredibly anti-social on planes, trains, and tubes, whilst still looking fashionable.
What I can do with these phenomenal ear woofers that I couldn't do before?
Well, I'd certainly be able to travel across the globe far more comfortably than I can today. And on long-distance flights and journeys, like the ones I take, that's incredibly important. In fact, I can't emphasize enough how much of a difference this would make to those adventures of mine. Just blocking out the noise would be enough to help me sleep a little easier.