As much as I hate to admit it, it was this Justin Bieber parody that put me on to the SteelSeries Siberia headset. In the YouTube comments someone was like “DUDE WHAT HEADPHONES IS HE WEARING” and someone else was like “steelseries siberia bro” and I looked at them and I was like “dang those are pretty baller!” (because, like I said, I’m a butthole now.)

Aesthetics mean a lot to me, because after all the audiophiles everywhere were like “Don’t get a gaming headset, it’s a waste of money, get some good Sennheisers and a clip-on microphone!” I just brushed these people off (the people that own $2000 headphones made of exotic wood to authentically recreate the soundstage of London’s Royal Albert Hall, and $2000 amps, pffft, what the heck do they know) and bought me some freakin’ SteelSeries Siberia v2′s.

Well, believe you me, when you go from a pair of 15 dollar speakers on sticks with foam glued to the edges, the Siberias are heavenly, but there’s always a downside in that apparently my head is ginormous, or my ears are freakishly low on my head, because this headset barely fits. I stretch the thing to its limits.

But now whenever I see someone wearing a pair of SteelSeries Siberias and the headband has a lot of slack, I know “That dude has a tiny head.”

Oh yeah, they sound pretty good too.

It's too big, Gus! (Click for full size)

Apparently they had used this heatsink, a Scythe Mugen-2 Revision B, to overclock an Intel Core i3-530 to roughly 4.3 GHz from its out-of-box clock speed of 2.93 GHz. Calling that “pretty impressive” would be a considerable understatement.

Unfortunately for me, this seems to have given me the idea that I could back off from the Core i5-661 (3.33 GHz) that I was planning on buying, to the considerably cheaper Core i3-530… and overclock it. You’ll notice the ellipsis. That’s because I’ve never overclocked anything, and in fact, have been kind of an opponent of overclocking most of my life. However, the ease with which this Core i3 seems to be overclockable, as well as the fact that I’m planning on using the ASRock H55M Pro motherboard (chosen because it’s slightly less expensive than, as well as reviewed better than the closest equivalent Intel board, and the added benefit of a second PCI Express x16 slot) which apparently has excellent overclocking options from the BIOS, means the temptation to overclock is higher than I’ve ever felt before.

All I can say now, though, is… we’ll see.

However, the GeForce has served me well and I’ve gotten nearly two and a half years of bang out of my buck. Of course, it would go even further if I wasn’t greedy and didn’t want to run Starcraft 2 at 1080P on full settings on a 47 inch LCD… but I digress.

The replacement? An XFX Radeon HD 4890. Just look at the benchmarks, then the price, and it’s easy to see why this was my option. The 4890 reference card noticably beats the Geforce GTX260 at most applications, with the bonus of being less expensive. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to get the Radeon for less than $200, as they disappeared from the market for a few weeks. Now they’re back–only temporarily, if I had to guess–for the vicinity of $210. (The ever-lovable Bing Cashback program has raked me 21 dollars in return, though, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.)

I also slid in under the wire for free shipping at Tiger Direct, an offer which supposedly is ending today; so I’ve got free UPS shipping on an order placed on Wednesday which is estimated to arrive on Friday. If this estimate comes true, I will most definitely be pleasantly surprised. I couldn’t swear to it, but I recall Tiger Direct surprising me with their quick shipment of my Acer Aspire One and its accessories that I bought from them back in October, so I can hope.

I don’t yet have a tracking code, so I can’t sit on UPS’s website hitting the F5 key, fortunately.

My only remaining concern is my old Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz sitting in its now-obsolete LGA 775 socket. I’m sure the performance boon from a CPU upgrade would have almost doubled the effect of this upgrade, but neither of my options seemed exactly lucrative. I could upgrade to a later Core 2 Duo model such as the E8400, but I would be upgrading to an already obsolete CPU; or I could upgrade to a Core i5, which would require a new motherboard as well as new RAM, bringing the expense of this upgrade to the vicinity of $600, and considering my upcoming two-week trip across the country, I’m not feeling up to spending that much at the moment.

Still, barring the surprise of an extreme bottleneck at the CPU, the Radeon should smoke my current GeForce and I should be able to kick all my games up a notch even without a CPU upgrade. Sweet!