Category: Reviews
Hands-on reviews of hardware I actually bought and used.
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Eight Months on CachyOS
It has broken my audio, refused to speak to my Bluetooth chip, and eaten thirteen seconds of my life every time I opened a settings window. It’s still my favourite operating system.
I run CachyOS on two machines, and they could hardly be less alike. gilgalad is a current all-AMD desktop that does photo work, gaming, and local AI. feanor is a second-hand ThinkPad X13 I found on a shelf in Japan for ¥45,800, whose CPU shipped in 2020. It’s my travel machine, and it’s also the one that carries my backups out of the house.
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CDs and the Fiio DM13
Late-stage-capitalism has us longing for a simpler time
One of the earliest teenage memories I have is sitting by the radio at 8pm every night to listen in to the DJ take requests and song dedications. I used to have a blank cassette tape ready to record the latest and greatest songs. I had to hit the record and play buttons at the same time to actually record the songs!
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D-Link DXS-F108T Review: Eight 10G Ports for S$340
A fast, honest little L2 switch with a web UI that will eat your work if you let it.
I spent most of a Saturday moving my house from an unmanaged 10G switch to a managed one, and the switch I picked was the D-Link DXS-F108T — eight 10GBASE-T ports, web management, S$340. Here’s what it actually does, what the datasheet gets wrong, and the four ways its firmware will bite you.
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Time to Upgrade: Zotac RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC Review
Nvidia RTX 3000 GPU’s have been in short supply literally from the minute they launched. There have been countless forum threads, tweets and Youtube videos dedicated to how impossible its been to find and buy one of these elusive GPUs. It looks like a combination of actual user demand, short supply, and scalpers have made it almost impossible to get your hands on one of these cards.
I have been targeting the RTX 3070 to pair with my Asus VG259QM, so that I could maximise that 240Hz refresh rate. So after reading about the kerfuffle surrounding the RTX 3080 launch, I didn’t hold out much hope that I would be able to buy one. On launch day itself (October 28), it was no surprise to see all the online stores immediately go out of stock. I took a trip down to the local PC mall, and was aghast at the marked up prices the retailers were selling the cards for. For a US$500 / S$750 GPU, the shops and scalpers were asking over S$1000!
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Asus VG259QM High Refresh Rate Gaming Monitor Review
The update bug got me. It got me good. With the recent releases of the latest generation graphics cards from Nvidia (the RTX 3000 series) and AMD (the RX 6000 series), I’ve been itching to upgrade my gaming setup. I know that it’s more a want than a need, but when has my addiction to the latest tech ever needed any justification?
For reference, my current rig was built in 2019, and isn’t too bad:
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