Spend most or all of your budget on the headphones. With your budget you can get a very high-end one from the top brands. If you stick to 300Ohms or less, any headphone should be drivable from the onboard soundcard. On-board audio is amazing these days, so unless you get noise or low output from that, don't spend any money on DACs and amps.

You could spend some money on a (USB) soundcard with Dolby Headphone support (Asus U7 for example), that will get you good surround sound from a stereo headphone. Don't believe that's possible? Listen to the virtual barbershop with headphones.

Don't bother with hi-res audio (you're not a bat and you can't hear a mosquito next to a jackhammer) and lossless audio (except for archiving purposes), it's mastering that makes a lot of modern music sound atrocious. Find well mastered music, enjoy it on your high-end headphones fed through a $2 sound chip.

I hope one of the clueless, barely English speaking TF2Center admins manages to explain to you why your drunk, ban evading buddy who told someone to kill themselves got permabanned.

Cool, where?

Go to a site, insult/troll/bait the people that made it, get banned, act outraged. K.

All you bull prodders aren't making TF2Center better, you're just making competitive TF2 worse.

TF2Center makes 2h long reservations on serveme.tf, even though they could use 5h long ones.

Been a while since I posted about serveme.tf, so here's an update:

On the EU side things are a bit meh. I'm considering terminating 1 or 2 dedicated servers because the average usage of the gameservers and donations don't justify 109 gameservers.

http://i.imgur.com/DK9GTw6.png

This should leave about 80 servers that I'll probably split 20-60, free vs premium. Before I do that though, I'm experimenting with a smaller pool of free servers in July, see if that convinces some people to donate.

Meanwhile in NA, everything's great. Due to the high popularity, use and donations, it was easy to convince tragicservers (use coupon "SERVEME30" for 30% off) to sponsor some additional servers. There are now 26 and as you can see, they were sorely needed.

http://i.imgur.com/rMi7C7W.png

GG, thanks to both teams for taking the time for these showmatches, also fuck ping and the speed of light.

The only technology right now that can give you low latency while your shared connection is saturated with torrents and memes is something called fq_codel. I was at a small LAN party where we shared a 20/1 connection with 8 people. All gaming, torrenting and watching streams without lag thanks to a fq_codel based router.

You'll need a router where you can install DD-WRT or OpenWRT on, TP Link TL-WDR3600 (cheap, N, not AC) or the Archer C7 for example. Enable QoS, use an ethernet cable.

KANKERZOOI

Hmm, if serveme.tf was unusable for this long whenever a TF2 update came out I'd be quite embarrassed, as a fair amount of people pay for the service.

If you ignore Admirable long enough, you don't have to stream the game \o\ /o/ Now I can just watch :D

Why would updates be a problem?

lol highlander

17:15 CEST ?

You can't use a shared medium like WiFi (especially 2.4Ghz) and expect it to be stable in the long run.