Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries

Tuan Nguyen, Editor-in-Chief, and Zak Storey, Staff Writer, reveal their latest tech loves

SCHIIT JOTUNHEIM

One of the best kept secrets in the audio community is Schiit Audio. It makes some crazy good enthusiast audio equipment with a no BS attitude. No jargon, no gimmicks; just straight up quality.

The company focuses on products for headphones, but some of its gear also works with powered studio monitors. For the most part, though, if you’re a headphone lover, you’ll dig its line of DACs and amps. Recently, however, Schiit released a product called the Jotunheim, and in my opinion, it’s a perfect high-end replacement for any internal or external PC soundcard product.

The Jotunheim includes a highquality DAC, pre-amp, and headphone amp in one small unit. Best of all, it supports single-ended and fully-balanced connections, which makes upgrading to high-performance monitors perfect. The audio quality is amazing, and unmatched by any traditional PC audio solution. I’ve been testing the Jotunheim with several mainstream and high-end headphones, and have not come across a single headphone where the little Schiit couldn’t deliver.

Best of all, Schiit allows you to configure the Jotunheim with modules. If you don’t need a DAC, you don’t need to have one. $399, www.schiit.com

PC PART PICKER

I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about PC Part Picker. As far as websites go, it’s right up there for convenience. I use it almost daily, for price checking, system speccing, a multitude of things.

It acts as a hub for PC enthusiasts, especially those looking to piece together a new system. Here you can set out what you want to build, and get a final price for the lot based on the best prices from all the online retailers in your country. It’s not 100 percent accurate—occasionally, you need to search for some products yourself on Amazon, Newegg, or Google to find the best price, and newer products and more miscellaneous stuff often aren’t on there (here’s looking at you, Samsung SM961 M.2 SSDs). But 99 percent of the time, it’s solid for pricing up the average build. It’s also great for rookies and people looking to get back into PC building, as it only lets you choose components that are compatible with one another. It also gives an estimate of how much power your system will draw.

There are also forums, featured builds of the month, build logs—you name it, it’s on there. It wouldn’t be impossible for us to do our work here at MaximumPC without it,but it would take us a hell of a lot longer. Free, www.pcpartpicker.com