There's music everywhere! Surround sound music formats from 8 Track tape to Blu-Ray

My latest video's the first audio subject I've tackled in a while: surround sound music. I've always had a curiosity about the 1970's quadraphonic era - I lived through it but didn't really experience it at the time. But since then, the industry's released more and better surround sound formats over time, and I look at everything from the quad era up to today's DVD and Blu-Ray audio to see if anything's really worth listening to. (Spoiler: yes!)

This video was actually really difficult to make, not to mention my most expensive video to date. Making videos about sound is not easy - who knew? Tricky to talk about surround sound when you can't actually see it or hear it through YouTube! But hopefully it's an interesting video nonetheless.

Is Virtual Reality (VR) worth buying in 2017?

Another new video! In this one, I follow on from my blog post on VR with a video on VR. I think it's actually quite an amazing technology! And spoiler alert: I do recommend it if you can deal with the current headsets with their infernal wires.

From my YT description:

We've heard a lot about the PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive lately. While the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard make for a good, cheap entry into VR, I take a look in this video at what the experience is like on today's higher-end systems and see whether it's finally worth taking the plunge on a VR system.

Some of the games I show in this video include Rez Infinite, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Job Simulator, Here They Lie, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Danger Ball, Hatsune Miku: VR Future Live, Driveclub VR, Eve Valkyrie, Battlezone, and Scavenger's Odyssey.

btw, that room scale video is a promotional HTC Vive video, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv6nVPPDmEI

If you're interested in buying one of these systems or games, do me a favor and click through one of my Amazon affiliate links:

PlayStation VR: http://amzn.to/2l8Ajkt
HTC Vive: http://amzn.to/2m49A7O
Oculus Rift: http://amzn.to/2m9UvBS

They have the same prices as everywhere. If you want to help me out, you can actually buy anything on Amazon after clicking one of those links. Thanks!

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What can you do with a $20 laptop?

My latest video takes a look at a thrift store find - a circa-1998 IBM ThinkPad 600X that I picked up for $20. Is a computer like this still good for anything? Watch the video and find out!

Incidentally, I'm going to be starting a new blog for my YouTube channel pretty soon (in addition to Facebook and Twitter pages), so when I do, I'll probably be posting all of these there. Or maybe I'll do it in both places; who knows.

The Apple II - Apple's most important computer

I mentioned a while back that I've started up a new YouTube channel, and I'm probably going to end up writing up a post here about every video I create. I may eventually split these posts off onto a new blog that's directly tied to the channel, but for now, here we are. I've done a bunch of videos you should check out, including an IBM Model M keyboard roundup, a look at the $99 Nintendo 3DS, the AtGames Sega Genesis portable, and more.

Last night I published my biggest video yet, in which I hold forth on the Apple II.

I grew up with the Apple II and I still have my original machine (that's it on the right). Most of my videos are a little more spontaneous and have a bit more humor, I think, but I guess I just have some reverence for the subject matter here. This was my first computer and I've held a grudge against the company for decades about how they treated it.

Anyway, check it out, subscribe to my channel, and leave a comment if you want. I'm not yet to the point of actively marketing my channel beyond this, but I am trying to rely on advertising revenue to at least pay for the topics I cover on the channel itself :)

The PlayStation VR - my... review?

There's a line in "A Christmas Story" about the "best Christmas present I had ever received, or would ever receive." I'm not saying this is that for me, but it's close!

This is the PlayStation VR. My wife had a hard time finding one for me, but I ended up helping her out with that. Only the Sony store in Manhattan seemed to have them in stock at all before Christmas.

I'd love to do a video on this thing, but I don't have the right equipment for it. So for now I'll just write about it here. I might do a video later just shooting directly at my TV set.

I love it. It feels like an entirely new way to play games. I know there have been abortive attempts at VR in the past, and of course the PS VR isn't the only option out there right now. (The HTC Vive is too expensive and requires an entire empty room; I did consider the Oculus Rift but decided I'd rather play in my living room.) But we're finally at a point where virtual reality can really be convincing.

Now, I've ridden a bunch of VR rides at "virtual theme parks" in the past, so I already knew both that I liked virtual reality and also that I didn't suffer from a lot of the negative effects some people seem to. I've been a gamer for a long time, and I think that helps. I never feel any sense of vertigo or motion sickness while wearing my PS VR headset; my body and mind are not fooled to quite that level, or maybe I'm just not prone to motion sickness in general. Your mileage may vary.

But it's still incredibly interesting to me that part of my brain is fooled, that I can't completely disconnect what I'm seeing in front of my eyes from reality, even though I know it isn't real. I suppose this is the same part of the brain that allows the movies we see to cause us exhilaration or fear or sadness, despite knowing we're watching actors recite lines from a script.

For example, the PS VR launch bundle that I got comes with a short demo from the upcoming Resident Evil: biohazard simply called "Kitchen". (Minor spoilers ahead, if you care.) In it, you're tied up sitting in a chair in, well, a kitchen. Your friend is unconscious in front of you. Eventually he wakes up and tries to cut your plastic restraints off. Suddenly, he's attacked from behind by a female infected (aka a zombie), who also stabs you in the leg. She then drags your friend's body away into the darkness before tossing his head at your feet.

From there, you can hear her banging around the room but you can't see her. You can look around, but it's too dark and you're still tied up. Suddenly, she puts her hands over your eyes from behind. When she takes them away, she then climbs on top of you, growling and dripping saliva and blood on your face, her knife ready to plunge into you.

Playing on TV, this would be a typical scene in any zombie game. In VR, it is legitimately scary. The first time I played through it, I actually exclaimed "aaaaaaaaaaahhh!" out loud and moved to the side (though I did laugh at the ridiculousness of it). One thing I somehow didn't realize about modern VR is that it is actual 3D, and the effect is far better than the paper cutout effect you get with 3D movies. All objects have real depth, so when a person really gets in your face in a VR game, it's easy to cower down instinctively.

I've now noticed this trick used in several of the other VR titles, and I hope it doesn't become a cliche, but I'm sure VR will eventually have its share of tropes like any other format.

I later downloaded and played through the longer Resident Evil: biohazard demo, and I have to say that by the end, I felt like I was in a real-life nightmare. Several of the titles that are on the demo disc are also horror titles, and in each one I played, the creepiness builds up over time. My brain almost slowly begins to accept and adapt to the game world as reality. It makes me a little worried about the future of humanity! Eventually, maybe once we get more elegant headsets, a lot of people will be playing games this way and almost living in total alternate realities. What kind of reality will people choose to inhabit, and how will that affect them in the "real world"?

That's a big subject that I'd like to see more written about. Certainly this goes beyond the effects of simply playing a game on TV - that seems obvious. VR really gets to you on a much deeper, more instinctual level, where even if the intellectual part of your brain isn't fooled, the animalistic part is. Whole worlds will be created to suit any taste, or indulge any fetish. Things will become normalized that maybe shouldn't be, and the lines between actual and virtual reality will begin to blur a bit - especially when VR games become more social. This is the same debate we've always had about violent video games, but VR makes even current flat-screen video games seem quaint in comparison, like a child's fantasy.

But it's also really fun, and I'm admittedly addicted already. I've ordered the physical version of Rez Infinite - one of the main reasons I wanted the PS VR to begin with - and I'm sure I'll pick up Rush of Blood, Batman: Arkham VR and Battlezone at the very least in pretty short order. Basically everything I've played on the demo disc has been fun, and nothing feels like the VR's clunky or tacked on. Everything is surprisingly polished and just feels "right" in VR. And PS VR games are generally made to be played either sitting down or standing in one spot, so it's pretty easy to fit it into an existing living room setup.

I do hope that enough people buy these things to make continued development of the hardware worthwhile. I'd actually love it if the PS5 was a VR-based console, with the sensors built into the system, allowing for a smaller headset with either a single cable, or no cables. (Wireless would be awesome.) VR headsets all need to be a little more elegant, easier to set up and not as cumbersome to use.

The PS VR is probably the worst offender because of its camera, processor unit and the four cables connected to it, two of which then connect to the headset and keep you tethered at all times. These cables aren't very long, either, which probably serves to remind you how close you need to stay to the PS camera (which helps track your head movements via lights on the headset). These limitations and annoyances need to go away for mass acceptance to happen. VR isn't something you sit on a shelf; this is something you have to wear and move your head around with. So it needs to be a little less cumbersome. I like PS VR's futuristic look right now, but I predict that in 20 years this generation of PS VR (and all current VR systems) will seem positively clunky.

I do highly recommend it for right now, though. It definitely fulfills the promise of a first-generation product. Despite the almost inherent goofiness of wearing a giant tethered headset on your head, this is really a new kind of experience. I don't think I've felt this way about a gaming platform since at least the switch to 3D consoles from 2D, and maybe not since the first time I played video games at all. We're one step closer to real Star Trek holodeck type stuff here.

I have a new(ish)YouTube channel

I've started a new YouTube channel, so far mostly focusing on vintage computers, tech and games. This isn't my first or latest video, but it's my favorite that I've done so far (of the four or five):

I called the channel "modern classic" mostly because I suck at coming up with names, but also because I basically do want to focus on things (mostly products, admittedly) that I think have stood, or will stand, the test of time. That allows me freedom to cover a whole bunch of different stuff I like, but it should all tie together.

Check out and subscribe to Modern Classic here.

Incidentally, I've also got a long-standing YouTube channel for the stuff I put up as parts of blog posts here... you kind of get one by default. It's pretty random and a lot of the videos in it are just snippets (and some date back to near the beginnings of YouTube!), but if you want to look at it too, be my guest. I'll probably still use it for stuff that really doesn't fit in with the new channel. There are a few things in there that I wish I could move over to Modern Classic, but Google doesn't allow that.

Lenovo ThinkPad P50 Review!

Well I never did quite get to do a proper review for my Dell XPS 15 (I had to do this instead), but I've now got one up on YouTube for my new ThinkPad P50 that replaced it.

I'm trying something a little different this time - I'm starting an actual YouTube channel. (I technically already had one for random stuff I'd shot and I wish I could move a few of those videos over, but YouTube don't play dat.) We'll see how it goes - but I've got a little more time than I used to now, so I've got some more stuff I'm planning to shoot. This video turned out a little more serious and hardcore than I originally planned, but maybe that's just me getting older. I've had this blog for something like 13 years now, so I probably have just entered a different era of my life. I'm no longer one of these kids making fast-talking, quick-cutting, ADD-inspired, seizure-inducing tech or lifestyle videos, which seems to be about 95% of YouTube these days.

Anyway, I love my P50 so far!

A Dell XPS 15 9550 horror story

I never even got around to talking here about my recent Dell XPS 15, like I traditionally have every time I've gotten a new computer - at least the most recent ones, including my Sony VAIO C Series, my Dell Vostro 3500, and my Lenovo ThinkPad SL500. Well, now I'm glad I didn't, because those first impressions would have been wrong.

Here's a video detailing what I've just gone through with Dell and my XPS 15:

Those of you wondering what I actually sound like, there you go. (Though I have posted videos with my voice in the past, but not lately.) Always weird for me to hear my own voice - I feel like I've got a little Ray Romano thing going on that I didn't used to have.

My XPS 15 is gone now, and good riddance. I also swore off Lenovo after my last ThinkPad, but I couldn't find anything better, so I've got a ThinkPad P50 on the way right now. It's like a full 180 from the design ethos of the XPS 15, but as good as it could have been if only mine worked properly, I also realized as I used my XPS that it was just too limiting. It is a 15" laptop but it feels and works like an ultrabook, and I just don't really want an ultrabook. I want an old-school, fully expandable laptop with a number pad. Hell, if I could have ordered a P50 with a Blu-Ray drive, I would have.

Don't get me wrong, though - I absolutely would have kept and enjoyed my XPS 15 for years if it just didn't break in multiple different ways only months after purchase.

The infamous "Atari Dump" - got my piece of it!

Yeah, today I want to show you some garbage. Historical and infamous garbage.

The first game console I ever played was the Atari VCS at my cousin's house in 1976. I grew up with Atari and I remember the video game crash of 1983 well. I personally remember the news reports of Atari dumping E.T. and other games in a giant landfill in New Mexico.

Over the years, this somehow became probably the biggest urban legend in all of video gaming. It was like the moon landing - many people swore that it never happened, and endless debates would take place all over the internet. Some of the claims did blow up into ridiculousness - that they buried "millions" of E.T. cartridges, for example. But most of the exaggerations actually seem to have been invented by those trying to prove that the landfill didn't exist. (It'd be kinda like saying the moon landings had to be faked because NASA said they got there at the speed of light.) And those exaggerations then became part of the debate.

But those of us who knew the dump existed never claimed Atari did anything but throw away a bunch of junk they couldn't sell. And not coincidentally, that included a lot of E.T. cartridges.

Finally, last year somebody set out to definitively prove that the Atari Dump is real:

You can watch that documentary in full on Netflix and various other places.

Spoiler: they did it. They found the dump. It's no legend anymore; it's fact, as it always really was. The first game they pulled out was E.T., just as the "rumors" suggested they would. Whole unopened cases of E.T. were found. Many other games were found as well - basically anything that didn't sell by the time of the industry crash.

The city of Alamagordo is still selling the spoils on Ebay (as they suggest in the documentary that they will!). The E.T.'s all seem to have been burned through, but they went for unreasonable amounts anyway - $300+ when I last checked. I picked up this copy of Defender for a much more reasonable $31, although at this point, it looks like prices are skyrocketing because there might not be much left.

My game came sealed up in a plastic bag with that metal City of Alamagordo property tag taped to it, with a separate manila folder containing a Certificate of Authenticity and photocopies of both some original 1983 news articles about the dump as well as a short written history of the dump and the dig. (I love the headline "Dump here utilized" - so straightforward, yet vague.)

I'm not going to show the Certificate of Authenticity (at least not until I heavily redact it) but it's signed by various city officials as well as Howard Warshaw, the designer of E.T., Yar's Revenge and many of Atari's most popular VCS/2600 games (and one of the guys featured in the video above).

I have not tried to play the game. I doubt it'd work; it seems pretty smashed up. But the box is unopened, and I can feel that everything's in there that should be. I find it interesting that there's a price tag on it - most likely, this game was returned from a store to Atari.

One thing I will say is that I was not prepared for the smell of this thing. The zip-lock bag does a good job of containing it, but man - when I took this game out to take the picture, I physically recoiled. It's not a smell I'm even familiar with. It's not like garbage, it's like what I imagine a compost heap smells like. It's like rotting organic matter. I quickly put it back in the baggie and opened all my windows. I doubt I'll ever take it out again. But I wonder if it's just going to continue to rot in there. I guess it's a fitting end if so.

My new toy from Japan

I'm still planning to write something of a trip report from my latest sojourn to my favorite island nation in the Pacific - I've just been a little preoccupied lately, mostly with work but a little bit with this:

A couple of the kids in my wife's family had PS Vitas when we were in Japan, and after seeing them playing, I couldn't resist. I am just a 40 year old kid, after all. (And I've been a gamer all my life.)

I hold weird allegiances when it comes to games, and I never even considered buying a PS Vita before. I've always owned Nintendo handhelds (up to the DS), and it pissed me off to an irrational degree when Sony announced the original PSP. The PS Vita I just wrote off as soon as it was released. But seeing people actually playing games on the system in Japan, along with the huge displays they have for Vita games and accessories at places like Bic Camera and Yodobashi (in contrast to the tiny little single shelf GameStop might devote to the system here), I just had to have one.

I picked up Powerful Pro Kun Baseball 2014 and Puyo Puyo Tetris while I was there - two franchises I know well. Puyo Puyo is usually sold as "Puyo Pop" here, and Powerful Pro Kun Baseball is the big-headed but surprisingly realistic baseball franchise that had one US domestic release on PS2, but is a long-running series in Japan.

I've since picked up Hot Shots Golf and have Persona 4 Golden on order - one nice thing about the Vita in the US is that the games are ridiculously cheap. And I'm far enough behind that I can buy all the older games that are even more heavily discounted.

But this is a fantastic system. It's well on its way to being my favorite portable system ever, already. I'm neither ready nor willing to trade physical controls for a phone's touch-screen, and the Vita's dual analog stick controls are the best ever in a handheld. Ditto for the screen, ditto for the graphics, which are easily at PS3 level quality in a freakin' handheld system.

Oh, btw, with the yen now at 115 to the dollar, it didn't make sense not to buy a system in Japan. And they have it in funky colors! (Mine's a new "Slim" model, though it's in a clear case in the photo above that makes it look chunkier than it is.) We just have boring black over here. No wonder the system's not doing well in the US.

I'm pretty happy with Apple's refurbishment process

I'm personally more of an Android guy these days, but I do own a few Apple products. (I'm a seriously old-school Apple guy, though - my first computer was an Apple IIc, and I still own a IIgs.) I just recently had to buy an iPad for use in a point-of-sale system for the store I own. Since it's not really for me, I just wanted the cheapest iPad I could get without being ridiculous about it and going first-gen on Ebay - I mean the thing's gotta actually work.

I ended up buying a refurbished iPad 3 from the Apple store. This is Apple's bastard child iPad that was only on the market for a few months - but perversely, it's also probably the best deal in a used one. I was quite pleased when I opened the box! Unlike the "refurbished" Motorola Xoom I bought that was literally just the tablet and power cord flopping around in a plain brown box, with clear wear marks and even fingerprints on the tablet itself, there is literally no way to tell that this iPad isn't new.

Everything's wrapped the same way new ones are, and I do think the outer shell and glass are new. (I'd read this before but didn't quite believe it.) This is what "refurbished" is supposed to mean, and did mean back when I sold electronics for a living in the 90's. It's supposed to mean "fixed up to be like new again", not simply "used". I'm not a big modern-day Apple fan in general, but props to them for being old-school on this one thing and putting in the effort that the term "refurbished" really requires.

The only indication that this isn't a new iPad is the "Apple Certified Refurbished" engraving in the box, which I'm convinced is there to stop people from buying these and reselling them as new. You could, otherwise.

Pardon the dust - that's all my dust, not Apple's.

I paid $299 for this 16GB iPad 3 with a retina display, which is only a little more (and in some cases less) than Ebay sellers are asking. At the moment it's on sale even further at $269, which kind of pisses me off, actually, but whatever. It came preinstalled with iOS 7.1 and it runs a lot better than I expected, given what I've seen on my wife's iPad Air. The Air is noticeably lighter but actually feels slower. I think it has an even higher-res screen and the CPU just isn't quite up for it.

I still like my Sony Xperia Tablet Z better. But I highly recommend buying refurbished products direct from Apple, if that's what you're after anyway.

LCD monitors still suck - I returned my ASUS PB238Q

I wrote earlier about how happy I was with my new (to me) ASUS PB238Q monitor. Welp, I've returned it. Two of them, in fact. Here's why:

Ignore the vertical lines - that's a camera artifact. You may not see the real problem initially - some people don't. Stare at it for a minute. It might help to tilt your own monitor upward.

The right side's brighter than the left. I mentioned this in my earlier report on buying this display, but I didn't think it'd bother me so much. But past experience tells me that I'm extremely sensitive to uniformity issues, and over a few weeks of use, I found myself constantly fiddling around trying to find a viewing angle, brightness or color setting where this was not so noticeable. Like a moth drawn to a porch light, I couldn't stop looking at the brighter right side of the screen.

Monitor issues have a way of driving you insane over time. If you notice something soon after buying one, you may as well return it while you can. You will drive yourself to drink eventually otherwise. You have to stare at these things for hours on end, sometimes every day - if you're bothered by something you find early on, you're never going to feel any better about it. For me, uniformity is the big bugaboo.

All LCD's have uniformity issues to one degree or another - it's the nature of the beast. Here's a useful graphic that shows the problem:

An LCD screen is made up of many layers, and they're never perfectly even. The biggest problem is usually the diffusion layer, which is all the way on the bottom and is supposed to evenly spread the backlighting generated by CFL's or LED's. These backlights are most often along only two edges of the screen - either left and right or top and bottom. First of all that diffusion layer itself is never 100% flat, and then the light it spreads out has to pass through all these other layers that aren't 100% flat either. The lights themselves may be too close to the diffuser, or not evenly close on both (or all) sides.

We all just have to live with this to some extent, until some new technology supersedes LCD. (Come on, OLED!) It gets worse as screens get bigger. This is a big reason why I have a plasma TV in my living room.

In the PB238Q's case, both monitors I got had the exact same non-uniformity pattern - brighter on the right side, with a dark patch near the bottom just in front of the power supply. It seems the diffuser is probably being pressed inward at that location. I'm not sure why the right side's brighter, though, but it seems it's just how this model is.

Anyway I realize I'm never going to get perfect uniformity and many monitors are technically worse than this, but I found the pattern of non-uniformity on the PB238Q too distracting to ever ignore. So on its way to me now is a Dell UltraSharp U2412M, which Amazon has at a little more than $250 right now - a great deal on a 16:10 e-IPS screen (that's what I really wanted to begin with). We'll see if it's any better, but there are more professional reviews out there for it and they're all positive - and more importantly, they at least show that it's brighter in the center, rather than on one side. I should be able to live with that.

I still think the PB238Q is a really good monitor for the price - it just wasn't for me. Most people probably wouldn't notice the uniformity issues at all, or if they did, they wouldn't care. (I asked my wife if I was crazy and she said no, she saw it too, but it didn't bother her.) Other than the uniformity, I loved my PB238Q with its old-school industrial look and build quality, its awesome stand, and its IPS panel for cheap - that's a rare combo right there. But I just couldn't help but be distracted and annoyed by the light side.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some batteries to change...

Taming the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 voltage regulator module (VRM)

This is kind of an oddly specific problem and solution, but this is a popular motherboard and I couldn't find anything truly definitive on how to fix this when I searched. Maybe this will help some of you. If you already know the problem and want the tl;dr solution: just run push-pull on your CPU cooler. Attach another fan on the back. That's it. If you want to know why, read on.

The Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 has been through four iterations now. One of the things they seem to keep changing is the design of the voltage regulator module heatsink - and apparently they never get it quite right. At least not for this board's intended purpose; it's supposed to be an enthusiast/overclocker board, but the high VRM temps mean you can't really overclock very far before throttling or other problems kick in. This is the area in question:

The revision 4 board actually has a pretty beefy heatpipe heatsink that's a clear improvement over the revision 3 board, and for many people (especially if you're running stock speeds) it should be good enough.

THE PROBLEM

It's actually twofold:

• This part of the motherboard is often a "dead spot" in terms of airflow, as it sits between (but slightly below) the CPU cooler and the case exhaust fan. Overclocking usually means a hefiter CPU cooler too, which further isolates this dead zone - all that heat just sits there on the heatsink.
• This sink is still barely enough to keep the VRM at reasonable temps even at stock speeds. I was getting 91C at full load (running Prime95 torture tests). Overclocking even a little bit - without changing the voltage - bumped that to 94C. And that's in a case with six 120mm case fans, and lots of little holes all over the case for passive airflow. There's just no flow right in this spot.

Temps like that won't fry your system or even lead to throttling (I don't think), but they're not particularly healthy over the long term. VRM chips do have more thermal headroom than, say, a CPU, but I don't like any chip in my system to be running at close to 100C - and if you have a worse case setup than I do, you could even be exceeding that.

THE CRAP SOLUTION

You could do something inelegant like attaching a fan or two directly to the heatsink, or using something like the Antec SpotCool to direct air onto it. I tried just hanging a spare 80mm fan off my CPU cooler to see if directed airflow would really help, and it lowered my full load temp down to 74C at stock speed. That's a 17C improvement - hey, it works! But it's also ugly and sounds yucky, and there's no easy way to permanently attach an 80mm fan in this area.

THE REAL SOLUTION

Go push-pull on your CPU cooler.

I took my bottom 120mm case fan and clipped it to the other side of my CPU cooler as a test. Luckily my Enermax ETS-T40-VD came with extra clips, but a lot of other coolers make it just as easy to attach an extra fan. Doing this, my VRM temps topped out at 81C at stock speeds, and 85C overclocked. That's a decent enough compromise, I think, and should be a pretty comfortable max operating temp for a VRM (remember, these are worst case scenario temps). I'm pretty confident these chips won't die before my next motherboard upgrade, and my CPU won't be throttled.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

ATX motherboards are pretty much all designed for downflow CPU coolers, because that's what AMD and Intel have used since Intel helped draw up the standard. With the stock cooler, the air expended by the CPU fan ends up being directed through the heatsink fins towards the RAM and VRM before being pulled out of the case:

But with most push-only tower CPU coolers, the airflow is directed too far above the VRM to do much good beyond cooling the CPU - it just goes in a straight line through the cooler and out the case. The extra "pull" fan just helps draw the VRM heat into that flow - it's not so much that it's pushing it directly out, instead it's pulling the hot air in behind it before expelling it out along with the CPU heat. It's obviously not as good as having air directly on the heatsink, but it's good enough. And it has the side effect of helping your CPU temps a tiny bit too, without adding any noise or ugliness to your case. I would bet a fan that "leaks" airflow a bit to the sides would actually be slightly better for this purpose. I'll eventually move one of my TB-Silence fans to be the pull fan on my CPU cooler - these have "ENERMAX" punchouts on the sides that should allow some air through the housing.

(BTW, yes I fixed my RAM slot usage up there - the board's manual confused me. And I've got all four slots filled now anyway.)

Enermax ETS-T40-VD CPU cooler upgrade

So what's wrong with the stock AMD CPU cooler?

Well, for one thing, just look at it! Despite being made by Cooler Master, this thing uses a tiny fan on a downflow heatsink - proven to be less efficient than tower coolers. And that fan - at full bore, it sounds like am Embraer Brasilia at takeoff power. It technically works well enough at stock speeds, though forget about overclocking, and if you're doing anything heavy, prepare to wear ear plugs most of the time.

Monitoring my temps with AMD's overdrive utility, I was getting thermal margins of about 16C with this cooler - or about 54C absolute temp according to HWINFO64.

(I bent that top left fin back - just hadn't noticed it before taking this photo.)

I specifically sought out the Enermax ETS-T40-VD - a just-discontinued model that's getting harder to find, but one of the few coolers that uses a red LED fan (and blue, and blue + red, in various combinations). And it's reasonably priced (assuming you can still find it), highly effective and reasonably quiet. I got mine from AAAwave. Enermax's current models are pretty similar but use a thermal heatsink coating (not really necessary) and different fans that have either blue or white LED's depending on the model... or none. This one has both blue and red, and 18 of each. Keee-razy!

Isopropyl alcohol and a paper towel is the easiest way I've found to clean thermal grease from both heatsinks and CPU's. I bought this bottle probably 10 years ago, as you can tell from the label.

You can already see one of the problems with the stock heatsink - look at the sides (beyond the thermal grease) - see how dull it looks. Well, that's true of the part under the grease too:

This thing really needed another round of polishing. You can actually feel that texture - it's like brushed aluminum. Hardly the ideal surface to mate to a CPU.

Installation of the ETS-T40-VD was pretty straightforward. Unscrew the old plastic clips, screw in the new included backplate and metal brackets, then screw the pressure plate for the heatsink on top. The hardest part was figuring out how tight to tighten the pressure plate screws that hold on the heatsink itself - I didn't want to crush the CPU, but did want to keep the otherwise free-moving heatsink from slinking around. One thing I do like about stock coolers is that they're pretty much idiot-proof, and they always click in with just the right amount of pressure. Not so with aftermarket coolers that are made to be "universal".

After installation. This thing's a monster. It almost touches my side window - if not for the bulge in the Corsair C70's side panels, I never would have fit the case back together. On the plus side, the height of the cooler means RAM clearance is not an issue at all. The fan sits about a full inch higher than my standard-height RAM. It's also surprisingly light - it supposedly weighs a little more than 1 lb. but it doesn't feel like it. I'm not at all worried about warping or cracking my motherboard.

Here it is running in normal light. I've chosen to run it with the red LED's because that's the theme of my case. Wait for it...

And here's the full case in the dark. Spooky! The power and HDD LED's bother me - I may mod those at some point. The case fans are Enermax TB Silence 120mm fans with red LED's - these are a little different than the TB Vegas Duo fan that the CPU cooler comes with, but they work well (though are not really "silent"). I'm also using the two Corsair plain black fans that came with my case - one on the bottom of the case, one in the back.

With this cooler, my stock temps dropped from 54C at load to 37C.

And I can't even hear it over my case fans, even at full load. It's 120mm and runs at the same speed, so there's no reason I would.

One thing I will caution with this or any other tower heatsink - use fan grills! I don't have any yet, but the one time I stuck my hand in there to try to change the LED color, I ended up with a fan smacking my finger, which led me to instinctively rip my hand out of the case, which then got caught on the top fin of the heatsink, which then bent. And it bent from the middle, so it's basically impossible to bend it back. Oh well. All for the lack of fan grills!

I recommend replacing the stock AMD cooler. And while I'm sure other coolers work just as well, I'm very happy with the results from this Enermax.

Next up: overclocking, and taming the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3's voltage regulator module!

Motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrade: going (almost) all the way

I mentioned earlier that it had been probably more than a decade since I last upgraded my PC. Sacrilege! When you go that long, things get away from you to the point that you can no longer just upgrade a component here and there - the interfaces don't even match up anymore. So a little while ago I had hit up Ebay for a used but somewhat recent Intel DP35DP and Q6600+ combo - just to get my feet back in the water:

This at least got my desktop up to the speed of my 2 year old laptop... but you know what? It just didn't look right in my Corsair Vengeance C70 case. That case demanded something beefier. I decided I wanted a modern gaming system again.

So when the latest Micro Center circular presented me with a deal I couldn't refuse, I jumped on it:

The components:

• AMD FX-8320 8 core CPU ($129, on sale from $179.99)
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 rev. 4 ($94, on sale from $159.99)
• Not pictured - 8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM ($66, on sale from $99)

I took Micro Center's 2 year replacement "warranty" on the CPU - which even the service guy told me is basically just a 2 year extension on their return policy. Come back in 2 years, get a CPU upgrade for free! (Well, really for the $20 it costs for the warranty. Still a good deal.)

My previous desktop processor was an AMD Athlon XP... 12 years ago. I'd been Intel pretty much ever since. I was kind of disappointed to learn that AMD's still got a lot of the same issues with their CPU's - they run hotter than hell, they require their own electrical substation and their memory controllers were scrounged out of Intel's garbage dump - but their raw performance per dollar still can't be beat, and that's at stock speeds. An Intel CPU that runs this fast would cost twice as much, and have fewer cores. I do a lot of video encoding, so I can never have too many cores. Give me ALL THE CORES.

I also read after installing the 990FXA-UD3 that these boards are known for having heat issues with the voltage regulators - but more on that in another post (there is an easy solution).

It's actually a pretty sweet looking board - I like the black and, uh, black-ish silver look. Stock CPU cooler for now, but I'll be talking about upgrading that in another post. I wanted to see how much of a joke this cooler really was first. (Hint: it is more of a groan-inducing pun.)

Closeup of the RAM and CPU cooler. The RAM isn't the prettiest, but it gets the job done. It's also not the fastest, but it... gets the job done. AMD CPU's can't really stress RAM much anyway, so it's fine.

Installed. Matches the black C70 case perfectly. You will notice that I don't have a decent graphics card yet - that's the final piece of the puzzle, and I should have at least a GeForce GTX 760 by early June. Hopefully the 800 series will be around by then and will knock a few bucks off the cost of the 760's (I doubt I'll be able to afford an 860 regardless).

Installation of this board in this case was like butter - in fact I've never had an easier time building a computer (for all intents and purposes, this was a new build). Everything worked on the first try and even Windows 7 played nice - no reinstallation necessary, just a lot of new automatic driver installs and a call to Microsoft's automated re-activation service line. 

The full C70 case with the new components installed.

Performance-wise I can only give you some anecdotes. Right now I'm mainly using these new components for ripping and encoding Blu-Ray discs for my tablet - actually an extremely CPU-intensive task if you want decent quality and small file sizes. I'm using MakeMKV and Handbrake to do the work, encoding at the full 1080p using the "slower" preset, x.264 and "High" profile, no filters, 2 pass encoding at 2000mbps with turbo first pass. With the old Intel setup, I'd get maybe 9fps if I was lucky. (The Athlon XP gave me more like 1.5fps - intolerable!) The Q6600 was fast enough to do about one BD disc in a 24 hour day.

This new rig is giving me about 50fps on the first pass and 30fps on the second. That's at the stock 3.5ghz. That's fast enough to re-encode a BD disc in an evening. It feels very fast! But still, someday we'll be able to do this kind of thing in 5 minutes - there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Next up: CPU cooler upgrade and overclocking!

New monitor - ASUS PB238Q

I bought a new monitor, only my third in the last 15 years. This is a big deal - it's the one part of your computer that you're staring at literally the entire time you're in front of it. One big rule I've always had with my computers is don't skimp on the I/O devices. Keyboards, mice, monitors - I try to buy good ones and I buy 'em to last.

That said, I do have a budget. I chose an ASUS PB238Q. This actually isn't a brand new model, but that can be a good thing - it means the manufacturer's had time to work out the bugs. It also means that product's good enough to have been in production for a while.

Same goes for the Model M...

Whenever I shop for anything, I start out mostly "cold" but with a set budget and a set of bare minimum specs and features that I want. Then I filter and scan those products over and over and see if anything starts to jump out at me. Something always does. Then I say "that's the one!" and pull the trigger. I've never been steered wrong that way.

I knew I wanted at least 1080p, 23", a matte screen, an IPS panel, and DVI input. That was the minimum, and I wanted it for $200 or less. The more I looked, the more I knew the PB238Q was "the one". Check this:

• IPS panel (AH-IPS, from what I've read)
• 1080p matte screen
• Did I mention it's matte? Matte matte matte! The whole monitor is matte, including bezels and stand.
• 6ms response time (not as fast as a "gaming" monitor, but faster than many IPS panels - a good compromise for image quality)
• Pretty much every port you could ever need - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort
• It comes with all of those cables! Well, except HDMI for some reason.
• Swiveling, height adjustable, tilting stand that also rotates 90 degrees
• USB hub if you care
• Speakers if you must, but they are extremely well hidden if you don't
• Chunky-ass construction - it looks like a tank, and it is!

I read before buying that some of these monitors have had cross-hatching issues, while others suffer from light bleed. Again, this is why it can sometimes be a good thing to buy an older design that's still in production - my monitor has neither of these issues. Mine was built in December 2013, so it's not an older panel that's been sitting on a shelf - it's a new build, and maybe they've just improved the quality control. The nice thing is that it seems like this thing was way ahead of its time when it was introduced in 2012, so it's still a good monitor today - but I only paid $206 for it (actually $168 after applying some credit card points).

Now, that said, it's not perfect - all LCD panels suffer from screen uniformity issues to one degree or another, and it's just a question of how noticeable it is. I'm particularly sensitive to this (it's a big reason why I have a plasma TV), and I do notice some lighter and darker areas of this screen with an even white or light grey background color, such as on many web sites. It's not visible in photos, videos or games and it's not bad even on white - in fact I couldn't capture it on camera - but I've seen more uniform LCD's than this one. Hey, at $200, there's still going to be a compromise or two - and this monitor seems to excel otherwise.

Not many ~$200 monitors can do this!

ASUS is capable of building solid stuff, and they're also capable of building junk. It depends on the line, and their mood that day. This is part of the "PB" series, which stands for "Professional Business" (the "PA" series is "Professional Artist" and is a notch higher - they take the time to pre-calibrate those displays). I've had the best luck buying "business" hardware even for gaming. "Business" and/or "Professional" is really just code in the computer industry for things that are built a little more rugged than your AOL-using grandma would need and less blingy than your pre-teen daughter would like. This monitor definitely has an old-school feel - and that's fine by me. It's made of very thick plastic, and the bezel has a matte texture - not the thin glossy crap that's trendy right now.

No, you can't see any uniformity problems above - that's just light from my window reflecting more off one side than the other. In fact, the right side is very slightly brighter than the left under even lighting.

You can actually see the better color accuracy of the PB238Q vs. my laptop in that photo, though. White on the PB238Q is white. Most people these days are used to the bluish tint that TN displays put out, but this thing displays white as white.

I will say that it's interesting how 1080p resolution almost looks low-res on a monitor this size these days, and if I replace this in a few years, that'll probably be why. My laptop's 1920x1080 also, and I'm used to the pixel density that res gives you on a 15" screen. I remember my 23" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema Display HD at work seeming unbelievably huge and sharp when I first got it about 8 years ago, but times do change. For desktop usage, you can definitely see the jaggies in text at 1080p on a 23" screen. Soon we'll all be moving to 4K... and then we'll need to be running 4 SLI graphics cards to keep up with that resolution.

The viewing angles and swivel stand in action! Honestly, my plasma TV's kind of spoiled me on viewing angles, but this thing's pretty good. Definitely better than my laptop, which is well-known for having a nice screen. (It's still probably TN, though.)

I'm not going to do a full review because honestly, it's not like I'd be the first and anyway, I don't have the equipment yet. My gaming graphics card is probably going to end up a birthday present, so for now I'll just be doing TV, movies and desktop stuff on this monitor. It's still a huge improvement over the $60 Hanns-G 16" TN monitor I was using before :)

Corsair Vengeance C70 case... abort! abort!

Just a follow-up to my previous post. Got my Corsair Vengeance C70 today. Hurrah! It's a beautifully badass case in person. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered this:

It's small (and I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but part of the back and side top pieces seem to be overlapping the wrong way), but this thing cost me $109 on sale. I did think about just dealing with it, but come on. You shouldn't have to put up with poor manufacturing like this in a brand new product for any amount of money. It's going back.

This kind of thing seems to happen to me pretty much every time I order anything. I don't usually write about it, but my order history is littered with returns for manufacturing defects, shipping damage and just plain idiocy by the store I've ordered from. (The Guitar Center transgression linked above is not the only one; Newegg once sent me a TV with no packaging at all. It was literally just loose in a box, complete with accessories flopping around against the unprotected screen.)

It's particularly disappointing because I bought this case in part due to the many online videos espousing Corsair's manufacturing and quality control, and this specific case's "ruggedness". Oh well. Live and learn. (Learn what, though? I'd love to know how to have greater success buying products that aren't f'd up.)

The desktop PC lives! IT LIVES!

I just ordered this - my next PC (case):

It's a Corsair Vengeance C70. Has all the features I wanted: rugged all metal construction, tool-less design (in fact the side panels are held on by those visible latches, which is awesome), side window, lots of fans. And a reset switch that's got a flip-up cover like you're arming missiles in a fighter jet. It's got character without looking like H.R. Giger designed a Fisher Price toy, which describes most "gaming" cases these days.

I'm getting back into PC building. I used to do it, back when it was just a bunch of nerds trying to save money and not hardcore gamers trying to build the most tricked out LED-lit system possible. In fact, my current PC can still directly trace its lineage back to my first-ever DOS-based machine, a Packard Bell 486 desktop from ~1993 (it looked something like this). I eventually wanted to add more RAM, so I needed a new motherboard and a new case. I took the remaining stuff out and and put it all in an Antec tower that I never took pics of, then upgraded again to this stylish little number when my new video card wouldn't fit:

That was my PC from around 1998-2002. I liked that case a lot, with its frosted plexiglass, chrome accents and stark white body. This was when most people still had boring beige boxes (including Macs!). I couldn't even find a non-beige CD-ROM drive for it. That one is still from my old Packard Bell - it was one of the last components to get upgraded.

I also bought an IBM Model M keyboard in 1999, when they started to get really hard to find (mine was made in 1996, one of the last years of production):

Keep that in mind.

When I upgraded again in 2002, I went silver and black and jumped on the hot rod bandwagon:

This was a new thing at the time - windowed cases and internal components lit up like a Christmas tree didn't exist yet. At this point, there was finally nothing left of my Packard Bell. The floppy drive was the last component to go - it had to be black.

But I realized I pretty much had a whole second computer's worth of spare parts lying around - and what I still needed would only cost me about $100. So I decided to build a second machine in 2003 mostly from parts that used to be in the white machine above:

Lian Li - pure class, baby! This thing became a Home Theater PC. My first-ever post on this blog was about the wireless keyboard I bought to control this PC from my couch.

Eventually I got distracted by the novelty of gaming on a laptop, and when I did want to play on my couch, I reached for my PS2 or Dreamcast controller. My twin towers sat neglected, used mostly for things like cataloging photos and watching DVD's.

I just like this photo. My wife and I used to share the same desk.

At some point I swapped the guts of my two silver boxes with each other because I just liked the Lian Li better, and that became my primary machine. But it basically remained stagnant for close to 10 years.

This is my desktop now. Like, literally right now. Same case, same keyboard, same speakers. But I've finally upgraded it to something less than completely embarrassing. It's not a screamer, but I now have a Core 2 Quad with 4GB of RAM. So I'm only about 2 years behind instead of 11.

My hand was forced, and strangely enough it was my tablet that did it. I wanted all my concert BD's on my tablet, and neither Google nor Apple make that easy (because they want you to buy stuff again from them... which isn't really possible when all your stuff's from overseas). So I rebuilt this machine as a video ripping and encoding workstation.

But now I want to game on it. I never thought Steam would take off and I never thought I'd be into it, but it did and I am, and my laptop's getting a little long in the tooth for today's games. Time for more desktop upgrades! And I may as well make it look cool while I'm at it. Hey, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. In addition to the incoming case, I'm hopping back on that LED train, baby!

As for the Model M, probably gonna keep it for now. After all these years, it's still the One True Keyboard™. Though maybe I'll check out one of these to match my new case someday.

By the way, I watched a lot of reviews on YouTube as I narrowed down my case search. As a result, I now subscribe to this channel:

Can you guess why?

Yep, I really love her voice.

The New PS3

My new PlayStation 3 has arrived, replacing my nearly-dead launch unit. (This is a similar story to mine.) Can't say I'm too excited as I never wanted to replace my original PS3, but since I used to write about video games for a living, I just wanted to give a few thoughts on the newly-redesigned system. I am happy to have a working system again, but, well, this ain't the same PS3 I once knew.

This is the Uncharted 3 bundle, which comes with the aforementioned game (that I don't care about) as well as some online game (that I don't care about). I looked for a bare-bones system and surprisingly couldn't find one, which I thought was odd. Most past systems were available both with and without pack-in games at this stage of their... er... "careers", precisely because so many people are replacing dead early units and may already have all the games and accessories they need.  So I wasn't too happy about paying for pack-ins. $269 seven years into a console's lifespan is hard to swallow, even with Christmas money paying for most of it.

The newest model is definitely not as much of a luxury item as the original 60GB model I have, which felt like a piece of pretty high-end home electronics. The new model definitely feels more like a game console circa 1997, despite Sony's push to make it a trojan horse streaming and gaming appliance (both MS and Sony have the same strategy with their game systems).  It's kind of cheap and plasticky, with its manual slide-open, top-loading drive and lightweight casing.  It's impossible not to knock it over by inserting a disc or even just hitting the power button unless you hold it steady with your other hand.  The original PS3 seemed made to stand vertically; the new model seems really ungainly in that position, even with its "stand" that makes it look like you left a compact disc sitting under it when you put the PS3 down. Horizontally, though, it's like the PS1 - you need to have a bunch of empty air above it to insert discs.

And obviously, no more backwards compatibility with PS2 games.  I didn't use this much but it was nice to know it was there - I still have a ton of PS2 games that I like to think I'll play again (and some, like Rez, that I actually do occasionally).

At least I was able to repair my old PS3 to work long enough to transfer my system over. I was glad to be able to get around the copy protection on game saves - wtf is that about?? Even if you're diligent about backing up your PS3 in case of failure, you're going to lose half your save games if your old system ever dies. That was a pretty nerve-wracking 90 minutes, though - I don't know how long my repair's going to last this time (previous one lasted maybe 3 hours of actual use), and I don't know what happens if you turn off one system while transferring... which only starts after formatting the new machine. But luckily, it made it through.

Oh well, so I'm back up and running, and my wife and I can watch movies and I can play games again. Hopefully this one will last me until the PS4... or Xbox 720, if Sony keeps pissing me off. (I've got beefs with them beyond this.)

Don't call it a "phablet" - the Galaxy Note II

My phone could eat your phone for lunch and still have room for seconds.  My phone could beat up your phone.  My phone contains chunks of your phone in its stool. (That's a Phil Hartman reference, if you didn't get it.) This is the kind of thing that pops into my head every time I see my new Android 4.1-packing, 4G LTE-supporting, quad-core CPU-powered 5.5" Samsung Galaxy Note II next to literally any other phone out there. Well, except maybe the original Galaxy Note, which is actually bigger. This thing is a monster.

But don't call it a "phablet". Samsung doesn't, and that's because it isn't. It's a phone, and it works pretty much like any other phone... just bigger. It's Samsung's flagship phone, frankly, with a faster processor, bigger screen, newer OS and more features than their as-yet better-known and cheaper Galaxy S3.

To someone like me, with gorilla-sized hands and tarantula-like fingers, it feels like a phone should. As soon as I picked it up, I had a "where have you been all my life?" moment. Other phones have always felt tiny to me, and I've never understood how people could thumb-type on a touchscreen or do other things that smartphones supposedly let you do.

I can literally make a fist around my wife's iPhone 3GS

It looks like a keychain or something, right?

Now be honest - doesn't this look a little more natural?

If you're wondering why I'm comparing the Galaxy Note II to an ancient iPhone 3GS, it's just what I happened to have around. But let's remember, nobody thought the iPhone 3GS was "small" until bigger phones came along. Phones are getting bigger over time - pushed along by innovators like the Note II that are still on the bleeding edge of size.

Even my Epic 4G, which was pretty powerful by the standards of the day (it was a first-gen Galaxy S), was too small for me to really do much on it other than text and email... painfully. As a side note, I owned an iPhone 3GS for one day and returned it in part because it was literally impossible for me to type on legibly. I know I'm not the only one, or sites like Damn You Autocorrect wouldn't exist. The Epic 4G partially made up for being too small with its physical keyboard, which is why I bought it.

The Galaxy Note II ("GN2" from this point on) finally lets me do everything I've heard people could do on touchscreen-based smartphones. I can type! I can text! I can browse the web - almost without squinting! I can play twitch-type games and do all the other things. This is what a smartphone should be... if you've got big hands.

SCREEN SIZE, HARDWARE AND BATTERY LIFE
The 16:9 5.5" screen on this thing let me sell my Nexus 7 (I've kept my 10" Motorola Xoom, though). You can do 90% of what you can on a 7" screen in 5.5". The screen itself is beautiful, and at 1280x720 resolution - the same as the Nexus 7 but in a smaller size - I don't see any pixels at all at normal distance. It is a Super AMOLED screen, so it is capable of those exaggerated colors that the tech's known for, but the GN2 allows you to change settings for a much more accurate appearance that's very well calibrated. Menus and icons can definitely look dull on the natural or movie settings until you're used to it, though.

One thing, if you're deciding between a big phone or a small tablet - Android can specify two different UI's both for itself and its apps, and as a phone, the GN2 uses the phone interface. So unless you plan on hacking the thing, don't expect to run tablet apps or have a bunch of extra screen real estate out of the box. Everything looks like it does on pretty much every other Android phone... just bigger.

The hardware itself has a really solid feel despite being all plastic (and Gorilla Glass). Before you pooh-pooh plastic construction, take a look at this Samsung testing video, which includes plenty of disturbing shots of the GN2 getting robot butt-stabbed and peed on.


Now do you understand why plastic makes a good material for phones? You're not gonna see any shattered backs or scratched paint on the GN2 or other Samsung phones.

I do find it advisable to use a case for no reason other than the phone's slickness - this is the one real downside to its construction. The glossy plastic on both the back and sides gets greasy very quickly and it's incredibly easy to drop the phone. And one other quick note: initially the chrome trim on my phone didn't seem to sit flush against the screen, and I thought about returning it.  Then I watched a couple disassembly videos on YouTube to see how the phone's constructed, and that convinced me to just try pressing in on that bulge, hard. Almost immediately the chrome trim snapped into place. So clearly, my phone just wasn't put together quite right at the factory, but it was an easy fix. The phone frame's just held together with plastic tabs - it's a very easy phone to take completely apart and replace any broken part.

The GN2 does have a MicroSD memory card slot, common in Samsung phones but becoming less common in others - including Google's own Nexus line. That means you can do what I did and install a 64GB card for 80GB in total storage, for a true monster of a phone and real high definition video powerhouse. Only a few years ago, most laptops didn't come with that much storage, and I was salivating over a Japanese phone that supported 8GB. You can save more books and magazines to the phone than you'd ever need for a plane trip, and more HD movies than you'd ever need for a cross-country train trip. (And let's not forget those "private" videos that some people seem to like to carry around.) And I doubt you'd ever even need to worry about space available for photos or videos.

Yeah, 80GB becomes 70GB once you cut through the marketing-speak.

Speaking of the camera, a lot gets written about smartphone cameras these days and how they're replacing dedicated point and shoots. That may be true, but I personally still find basically all smartphone cameras to be crap. In bright light the GN2's performance is decent, but maybe it's just me... I find I shoot mostly in low light situations, because that's when the fun stuff happens. And in those situations, the tiny sensors on smartphones - including the GN2, iPhone 5 and others - just don't measure up. Too noisy, underexposed (to keep the gain at a minimum, I'm guessing), and too blurry as the image processor tries to reduce that noise by smoothing it out. Here's an unmolested low light photo from the GN2 that suffers from all of these problems in spades (click the image for the big version):

I'm going to keep carrying around my Nikon S8200 when I know I'll be taking snapshots, and my Canon Rebel T2i when I want something a bit more serious. This isn't an indictment of the GN2's camera, but all smartphones. They suck as cameras, even today, and are only worth even thinking about because a smartphone's a camera you'll always have with you.

The battery, on the other hand, is a huge and removable 3100mah, and while my Epic 4G was barely able to make it through a single day, I go to bed with this thing at around 75% every night - and I use it! You can never have "too much battery" and I actually hope the GN3 embiggens it further, but for now this is the best battery life this side of the Droid Razr MAXX (a phone you'd really only want for its battery life). Being removable, you can also carry as many spare batteries around as you want. Carry an infinite supply and you'll never have to charge!

S PEN
Aside from the screen size, the GN2's other big feature (pun intended) is the pressure-sensitive S pen that basically turns your phone into a small Wacom drawing pad. Apple intended with the iPhone to do away with styli, which up until that point were thought of as necessary for PDA data entry. I'll grant Apple that it's true, a stylus isn't necessary, but it is definitely useful, especially as Samsung's implemented it on the GN2. One of the things that I always wished my Epic 4G could do was let me just jot down a quick note. And sure, I could unlock the screen, open some sort of memo app, then type something out, but it always felt clunky and harder than just picking up a pen and writing something on the nearest piece of unopened junk mail. It was pen-less smartphone technology, as pioneered by Apple, that seemed archaic and inelegant, not the simpler pen and paper.

I love that the GN2 lets me pull out the S pen with the phone asleep and immediately scribble something on the screen - just as if I were using a real pen and paper. It knows when you take the pen out, and it can immediately open an S Note window (yes, a window!). If I use the S pen for nothing else, this feature was absolutely worth the price premium vs. competing phones.

Notice I don't touch any controls on the phone until I turn it off, which would happen automatically if I didn't do it manually. And yeah, unfortunately that is an accurate reflection of my handwriting.

SOFTWARE/BLOAT
My GN2's the Sprint version, and it does come with Sprint Zone, but I don't really see any other Sprint-specific apps. No NASCAR, at least. There is a whole suite of Samsung apps, most of which are not useful to me (many just duplicate Google Play services, but not as well), but they do have a "find my phone" feature if you sign up for a free Samsung account. Clearly, Samsung is trying to be the Apple of the Android world (though I'm not commenting on whether they've stolen any patents - even if they have, massive companies like Apple are not who the patent system is designed to protect). Unfortunately, the Samsung apps seem generally to be uninstallable, and some of them run all the time whether you want them to or not. It's pretty shocking to look at my running apps and see 1.1GB in use without me having loaded a single thing - yeah, this phone is crammed with what I'd call bloatware.

But it's also loaded with cool software features I personally haven't seen in a phone before. Multi-window support, which makes the phone a true multitasker and the only one I personally know of. Custom home screens for different tasks - in addition to an S pen-specific home screen that pops up when you remove the pen, you can also set up custom home screens for when you insert headphones, when you dock the phone, or other situations. One cool feature I stumbled on completely by chance (and this is your warning!) is DLNA support. Don't know what that means? Well, if you have a fairly new TV, and it happens to be on, just make sure you're not watching anything on the phone that you wouldn't want others to see when you press this button:

Any of your own videos - you know, the kind without DRM, that you'll be storing on your SD card - can be watched on your TV through the phone, wirelessly. It is really pretty cool, especially because of how seamless it is. It just works, instantly - and I don't even have a Samsung TV!

Sorry for the close zooming there, but I'm not interested in showing off my messy house. I can assure you I touched nothing on either the phone or TV (or its remote) other than the DLNA button on the phone.

Fortunately, the phone is rootable, which allows you to remove all the junk if you're so inclined, and there are also plenty of community ROMs available for you to install that strip all the unnecessary stuff out.

I personally wouldn't do that myself, at least not yet. Samsung puts their own loader on Android called TouchWiz, and the latest version (made specifically for the GN2) is actually quite good - and it's responsible for many of the things that make the GN2 what it is. Multi-window support - that's a TouchWiz feature, not an Android one. The S pen feature I talked about above - that's another. TouchWiz itself is also plenty fast - the phone does hitch up every once in a while, but I'm pretty convinced that's because of the running apps and services, not TouchWiz.

CALL QUALITY
I'm including this section mainly out of a sense of obligation, because in case I haven't mentioned it enough, this is a phone. The truth is I've never heard - nor has anyone on the other end of my calls, that I know of - any difference between any American phone that I've owned. The network you're on is the biggest factor in call quality, and Sprint's voice coverage is kind of middling, but no American network is perfect. There are always dropouts here and there, and there's always a tiny but noticeable digital delay. Most of the time, the sound quality itself is good, as you'd expect. Small speakers and microphones aren't rocket science.

I have high hopes now that Japan's Softbank is buying Sprint, and has pledged to heavily invest in their network. CEO Masayoshi Son has said he thinks American networks are a joke, and he wants to bring Sprint up to par with what you might expect in Japan. This actually helped convince me to stay with Sprint for my upgrade.

THE COMPETITION
And what about competing phones? Well, just as I was ordering my GN2, HTC and Verizon announced the Droid DNA - another big phone (though slightly smaller than the GN2) with a 5" screen. The Droid DNA's got the tech world's hearts all aflutter over its 1080p screen. But other than that one feature, the Droid DNA's a pretty pedestrian phone, with a weak, non-removable battery, only 16GB of onboard storage and no SD slot expansion. It also has a locked bootloader, so when that day comes when HTC and Verizon stop updating it (and given their history, that day will come soon), you're SOL.

There's of course the iPhone 5, which I honestly considered again in anticipation of its announcement, but I was disappointed with its lower, weird resolution that doesn't match any HD spec. It's also too small, with Apple insisting on making a phone that everyone can use with one hand, including house cats.

There's the LG Nexus 4, which again is a smaller phone but one that ships without any bloatware. I was eagerly awaiting this phone, until Google announced it and it had neither a MicroSD slot nor LTE support.  Pass.

Then there are other, more accurately labeled "phablets", none of which really seem to get the balance right. The GN2 succeeds because it is a phone, just a big one. I don't think I'd have liked the original Note as much, which was wider and more like a small tablet. The LG Intuition is similar, and just look at those sharp corners. It's also running an older version of Android.

I've been thinking about the reason why Android is beating iOS (except in the immediate aftermath of any new iPhone release) and why Samsung, specifically, is beating all other Android smartphone manufacturers lately. And I pretty firmly believe it's because of, not despite, the sort of wild west mentality of Android combined with the way Samsung blends old-school PC-style customization and features galore with a clean, modern style. The Android ecosystem is like a little microcosm of America - it's huge, messy and kind of anarchic, but it's also open and free and you can do what you want. The elephant in the room when it comes to technology is that we like things to be a little messy. A perfectly closed, perfectly symmetrical and perfectly maintained ecosystem is just unfamiliar and unintuitive to us - it's not a reflection of our reality, and we feel constrained. It's like living a real life in America and a mobile life in North Korea.

Apple, most Android manufacturers and even Google themselves lately have increasingly taken a closed approach to how you use your device - locking the bootloader, removing expansion slots, making the battery non-removable, etc. They do these things ostensibly to avoid "confusion", because they apparently think we are idiots who can't figure out where our stuff is. (Isn't this a failing of the OS rather than the user?) Everybody who thinks this way about us consumers needs to stop. Right now.

Why does a company like Samsung, with their old-school styli, user serviceable plastic construction, "confusing" SD slots, removable batteries and unlocked bootloaders, endless customization options, monster specs and insanely long feature lists sell boatloads more devices than anyone else?

The question answers itself. That this isn't incredibly fucking obvious to the rest of the industry - including Google and Apple - makes me want to take these guys out back and slap them. No, I'm not saying millions of people have purchased Samsung phones because of an unlocked bootloader.  But add up all these features and the different people they appeal to and you've got a hit phone. The conventional wisdom that we all want simple devices that limit what we can do is wrong.

Like most other device categories (cars, A/V receivers, refrigerators), what we really want is the kitchen sink, and the freedom to choose what features we do and don't use. And the sales data supports that fact. Maybe the rumored new Samsung OS wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
There's not much I would say I dislike about the GN2. In fact, my next phone will almost definitely be a Galaxy Note III. But what I'd like to see in the next Note is a more grippable surface, a 1080p screen, and an even bigger battery. Oh, and less bloat. Other than that, just keep on keeping on, Samsung.