Best products from r/ns2

DON'T buy "surround sound headphones". Invest in a good, quality pair of stereo headphones and buy a good soundcard that emulates a 5.1 environment with either Dolby Headphone or CMSS-3D (I prefer the latter).

I own and would highly recommend the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro, but the DT 990 Pro can be had for less. The main difference is that the DT 770 is closed whereas the DT 990 is open. With a closed headphone, others will not hear sound coming out of them as easily, which is good if you like to play late at night with others in the house. an open headphone allows for a better "soundstage", which basically means that it will sound "better" (this is highly subjective). I haven't used open headphones before so I can't pass judgment, but I love my 770s. I'm still unsure as to why there's such a price difference between the two, though.

As far as sound cards go, you want something that will do "simulated surround sound". Dolby Headphone and CMSS-3D are examples of this technology. I prefer CMSS-3D over DH, having used both. For CMSS-3D, you have to buy a Creative sound card -- I recommend the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium because it can be had for relatively cheap these days. They don't make it anymore, which is why you have to buy from eBay (they sell a refurbished one on Amazon, too).

If you buy the Titanium X-Fi, get the Pax Drivers. They are MUCH better than the stock drivers and make setup a breeze in comparison.

If you decide to go this route and need any help, shoot me a message, I'd be glad to help.

Well I'd like to share my results. This is on a Dell Latitude E6440 i7-4610m with a AMD Radeon HD 8690M switchable graphics card with Windows 7.

Spectating gets me 30-40 FPS (with real lows of 25 rarely) 1366x768 with an-isotropic filtering, anti-aliasing and high texture quality active, otherwise minimal settings.

The CPU gets sorta hot running at 85 C and GPU at 65 - 70 C. I'm looking into getting a portable external cooling fan like this.

Initially the game refused to load on the proper graphics card, loading on the default intel hd 4600. After updating the graphics card drivers everything worked beautifully, and I'd also like to note that the new AMD catalyst center is AWESOME and even provides the ability to overclock a bit. Pre-upgrade catalyst control center was garbage.

Also the keyboard and mouse do not function simultaneously unless you disable touchguard under dell trackpad settings.

Overall I'm very happy with this machine and would suggest it to anyone looking for a primary laptop workstation with good battery life with the ability to game on occasion plugged in. Especially noteworthy is the (dell unsupported) msata slot, thus with certainty the ability to use at least 3 disk drives (one msata, one standard 2.5, and a second 2.5 in the disc drive bay). BIOS actually lists a fourth sata interface, though I've yet to attempt to determine if that would enable another msata or whatnot - if so it would be a half size, which do exist but are rarer.

Cooler Master Storm Spawn

Most comfortable mouse I've ever owned and designed specifically for claw grip.