Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
However, there may be situations when you can't rattle the rafters. Whether
it's out of consideration for family members, roommates, or neighbors com-
plaining of the volume level, or your desire to combine headphones with a
microphone for multiplayer gaming, a good set of headphones should also be
on your shopping list. If you don't intend to use your PC for Internet voice
calling, there are a number of excellent high-end stereo headphones available.
But if you're like me and need to occasionally wear a headset for Skype or
Google Hangout calls, consider Corsair's Vengeance 1500 Dolby 7.1 USB
gaming headset (see the next figure). I find them to be high quality and com-
fortable; they fit my head well and don't cook my ears even during long calls.
2
Figure 59—The Corsair Vengeance 1500 USB headset
While the motherboard's onboard audio will serve our needs nicely, the same
can't be said of the onboard video. It's functional enough for basic use and
troubleshooting, but for our PC to be truly awesome, we need a powerhouse
video card to keep up with the computationally intensive demands of rendering
modern entertainment in real time.
Pushing Pixels
Today's high-end graphics cards are often more powerful than the computers
they are installed in. That's because they are performing a massive amount
of real-time computation to render photorealistic images and animations
