Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Daedalus has two excellent videos on how to play a pyro and the spy. If you happen to play, give them a look!

I had figured that Intel’s latest-and-greatest integrated graphics solution, the Intel GMA X3100, might actually be able to keep up with a discreet solution like the Mobility Radeon 9600 variant (the Radeon X1300) in our ThinkPad T60 notebooks. For comparison purposes, let me remind you that the 9600 series is pushing 4-5 years old at this point. Four pixel pipelines just doesn’t cut it anymore.

On paper, the X3100 looks great:

There’s still no discreet memory for this thing to use; it hogs some system RAM for itself. I don’t know what kind of latency penalty this causes the X3100 to incur, but I had figured it would be a little slower. In any case, you’d think I’d be able to run Team Fortress 2 on bare minimum settings at 800×600. Sadly, this is not the case. Perhaps they need to improve the hardware T&L engine’s support in their driver?

So I was in the market for a portable, comfortable gaming headset with a boom microphone that didn’t totally suck. After the quality problems that plagued the removable boom mic on the Medusa 5.1 headphones I was using (they have since made the mic non-removable on newer versions of the ‘phones, rather than actually improve the connector quality), I decided to stay away from any of their offerings. After some searching and a lot of review reading, I settled on SteelSeries’ 5H Version 2 headphones, boasting a gaming-tweaked soundstage, awesome retractable boom microphone, and the ability to split into three parts for easy transport.

The obligatory front shot of the 5Hv2 headphones.

The “v2″ isn’t in the name because it looks cool. SteelSeries went and improved on their first design in a number of ways, most noticeably by increasing the size of the headphone’s ear cups. They’re extremely comfortable, and I’ve forgotten I was wearing them on a few occasions since I received them two weeks ago. As far as the sound goes, these are gaming headphones first. Their soundstage makes it much easier to pick out gunfire and footsteps in first-person shooters, but this leaves music sounding a bit metallic. While they’ll work as a “general purpose” piece of audio gear, you don’t want them if you’re not going to use them to play video games.

The collapsible boom microphone is one of the cooler features, and it produces excellent-sounding voice.

When not in use, it rests inside the left earcup.

Braided cloth cords offer superior durability. You can run these puppies over with your chair and they’ll be just fine.

Gold plated connectors! Although this only helps if your ports are gold as well. The standard cord is three feet long, but there’s a six foot extension cable if you need it.

The volume controller is pretty simple, offering microphone sensitivity adjustments in addition to volume level control. It’s light, so it won’t pull your shirt down if you clip it to a pocket.

The earcups click into the headband with some very secure-looking plastic clips. You need to hold a button down to pull the headphones apart, so they won’t just “crumble into a heap” while you’re playing. This also makes them easier to transport and less likely to suffer damage in transit.

All in all, the SteelSeries 5H v2 headphones are a must have for any gamer who wants excellent stereo sound, comfortable earcups, and a mass of useful extra features. The collapsable microphone alone is worth the price.