Hoopa

Yes the technology is there and a tv can look good for both pc and tv functions, but it really depends on the tv. I was on a quest for the best large screen monitor myself earlier this year. First I bought a panasonic st-30 42" plasma ($1260) because plasma is a "superior tv technology." Well, it didn't display text very sharply, and at the distance of 3-4 feet, the dithering that plasmas do was visible. You have to sit back to enjoy plasma. I wouldn't recommend one as a pc monitor. I returned the panasonic and picked up samsungs latest LED LCD offering, a 40" UND6400. ($1300) The text was sharp like a pc monitor, and when in game mode the input lag was appx 40ms, which was on par with the panasonic. The samsung had very bad ghosting though when playing fps pc games, due to its panel type.... this was unacceptable to me so I returned it. I ended up buying a HP ZR30w which is a 30" S-IPS pc monitor with 2560x1600 resolution, which I do not regret...... Now, my buddy has had much better experiences with lower end tv's. He has had both 32" and 37" insignia 1080p tv's, the 32" was a 60hz and the 37" a 120hz. The 60 hz tv worked very well and he had no complaints but wanted a larger screen so he picked up the 37". There is a ton of input lag when in 120hz mode, but it looks good for movies. When the 37 is in 60 hz mode, it does not have any noticeable input lag. Both of these tv's were inexpensive, and neither LED backlit. I would suggest not going larger than 37" if you are going to be a few feet from it. You might be able to get away with 40" but imo 37" is perfect. Go with a cheap 60 hz, standard LCD tv and give that a shot first. I went with the expensive tv's first and they failed me.....

SO I received the Sennheiser PC 360 headset, purchased thanks to a recommendation in this thread, and they are very comfortable and light which was my main concern. They do not get hot; they breath well, and also sound exceptionally good. I would recommend them, of course I have not tried other high end gaming headsets so I have no points of comparison.

Sounds quite practical to me, and yes it'll work fine.

Amazon is selling the Sennheiser pc 360's for $227 with free shipping. I just ordered one. Thanks for the recommendation.

I cannot find these for sale online anywhere. Do you have any suggestions?

It might sound dumb but I would recommend a 32" or 37" LCD tv and I'll tell you why. (not led, just regular LCD) A while back I became obsessed with finding a large format monitor with the perfect picture. My budget was 2k or so. I didn't care about price, I wanted the best picture. Rather than jump straight to a 30" IPS, I wanted to go BIG. 30" wasn't impressing me much. I purchased a 42" panasonic ST-30 plasma to use as a monitor ($1260) because plasma's are a "superior tv." While the picture for movies looked quite good, I didn't like it as a pc monitor. Sitting close to a plasma is no good. They dither colors and text is not very sharp. I returned The panny and got a Samsung - UN40D6400 - 40" LED-backlit LCD TV. ($1300) This was a brand new model at the time, which was about April or so. It was the most expensive 40" in best buy I think. The screen has some backlight uniformity issues, but the color was pretty good and it was brighter than the plasma and text was sharp. BUT... When I played fast paced FPS games like TFC and Fortress Forever, there was noticeable ghosting.... which was a deal breaker. I returned the sammy and picked up a HP ZR30w 30" IPS monitor rather than trying more TV's. I do not regret that decision. With 2560x1600 you can sit right up to the screen and you still cannot see pixels, so it is as immersive as a bigger tv from 3-4 feet. Now, my buddy had a different, more positive experience with cheap TV's.... Which surprised me. First he picked up a 32" 60hz Insignia tv for $280 open box from best buy. According to him, the blacks were impressive and there was no noticeable input lag. I didn't get a chance to see it. He then upgraded to a 37" 120hz Insignia, and this I have seen and used. When the 37 is in 120 hz mode there is a good deal of input latency which is noticeable when using the mouse, but it does look slick for movies. With the 120hz turned off, the input lag is not noticeable. He got the 37" as an open box for $400 from BB. TV's generally have a certain amount of input latency vs a pc monitor, but it depends on how much post processing the tv is doing. I tested the tv's I had purchased vs a CRT, and the input latency was around 40ms on the panny and 50-60ms on the sammy, both being in "game mode," which turns off most processing. Cheaper TV's generally don't do the fancy processing that more expensive tv's do, and also they are most likely TN panels which wont have ghosting issues. As of now there is actually a 32" "monitor" on the market, which is sold as a monitor/tv. This just goes to show that TV's are essentially the same as monitors, except that pc monitors don't do the post processing that TV's do. So, I would suggest picking up an inexpensive 32" tv, or at least a 27" pc monitor, as big screens are niceeee... I wouldn't go over 37" though if you are going to sit right up to it or you will start to see the pixels at 1080P resolution. 37" looks good and is massive, 40 is starting to push it...

I have a vertex 2 60gb and vertex 3 240gb. The vertex 3 had a lock up issue, where windows would lock up for 20-30 seconds at a time. Upgrading to firmware 2.09 fixed the issue. Haven't had any problems since the firmware update. (actually I fixed the problem myself before firmware 2.09 came out by setting W7 power settings to performance and HDD: ALWAYS ON, but I think 2.09 addresses the lock ups) So two good OCZ drives for me.

I baked an 8800gts320 which fixed it for about 2 months before starting to artifact again. From this experience I gather that the solution is temporary.

I had a AOC V22, which I believe was the companies first LED backlit offering, and perhaps the first LED backlit monitor on the market at the time which is why I bought it... and it had visible color banding/gradients, especially on skin tones. It made porn look awful. Moving skin would make a rhythmic rainbow pattern appear which was green/red/yellow in appearance. Just a FYI. I haven't seen any of their recent monitors however.

I would suggest software RAID 1 (meaning using the motherboard raid function) with 2x 3tb drives. This will only set you back About $260 and will protect you against a drive failure. Use a separate drive for your operating system to limit storage drive usage. Switching a RAID 1 between Intel based motherboard is not difficult, when it comes time for a new build, say. As for the drives themselves, the 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 0S03230 / 0S03228 model drive has been good to me. I have 3 of them in raid 5 and none were DOA; they run cool and quiet and I have no complaints about their transfer speeds. Also they are the cheapest 3TB drives. I plan to buy several more and raid 6 them with my Adaptech 6805 controller. I would also suggest that you have a case with a front fan intake which sends air directly over your hard drives. This will be the difference between hard drive temps which are very hot to the touch, or barely warm. External enclosures generally run HOT. Sharing files over the home network is easily done in W7 be creating a homegroup and setting the array to shared.

I was having this issue as well with my 240GB Vertex 3. This is a windows problem it seems, and not a hard drive problem. I do not think windows is optimized for SSD's... I fixed this by doing a couple of things... Firstly, at least on their forums, OCZ suggests doing the firmware upgrade in IDE mode. To do this, I installed windows on my old ssd with the bios set to IDE, did the firmware upgrade to the vertex 3, then changed back to ahci mode. In windows power management, you want to be in performance mode, and change the "turn off hard drives after" to NEVER. You also need to turn off the automatic hard drive defragmentaion, which is in start>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter. SSD's dont need to be defragmented... I do have the intel rapid storage technology drivers installed, so NCQ is enabled. If I get any lockups in the future I will try not installing the RST drivers. I used to lock up every 30 minutes, now I haven't had a lockup (possibly had one for about 5 seconds, not sure) in over a week. Be sure and have your chipset drivers installed and windows7 up to date as well.

May I also add the suggestions of Scythe Mugen 3 and Zalman CNPS10X Quiet. I have the Zalman quiet on my stock clocked 2500k. While folding at 100% cpu, and with the fan on the lowest setting, my cpu sits at about 45c. It's virtually inaudible. The mugen 3 gets good reviews and is supposed to be one of the top performing coolers temp wise and it's about $45. Newegg lists it as "Scythe SCMG-3000."

Seriously nice hand work man! I'm impressed. Does not look hacked together in the slightest. Might I suggest 1.8mm stretch magic elastic cord for suspending the hard drives: http://www.amazon.com/Stretch-Magic-1-8mm-Bead-Jewelry/dp/B001C1Y174/ref=sr_1_1?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1309062399&sr=1-1

One possibility: if you installed windows on your hard drive with the bios hard drive mode in IDE, then switched to AHCI, or vice versa, windows will fail to boot. This could be the case if you did a "restore bios to default settings" or did a flash of the bios.

SMART data on my 240GB OCZ Vertex 3: 230: SSD Life Curve Status Current state of drive operation based upon the Life Curve: 100 231: SSD Life Left Approximate SSD life Remaining: 100% 241: SSD Lifetime writes from host Number of bytes written to SSD: 1013 GB 242: SSD Lifetime reads from host Number of bytes read from SSD: 1039 GB $540 well spent imo... but I'm an enthusiast. I'm enthusiastic about hardware, you see.