@kraken2109: Probably $150 - 200 for headphones/headset

Thanks for the input guys. The Asus Xonar DGX seems very reasonable at $40 on Newegg. Now, what about hearing this new sound? Klunt said the AD700s had descent bass but I'm just not sure. I'm not a bass head, but I want explosions to have some grunt to them. I've also considered some Sennheisers based on good reviews I've read.

C'mon, I know there's a few audio guys on the forum.

All this started when I started looking at other headsets/headphones for gaming, and came across separate amps and DACs in Youtube tech reviews. I understand home theater audio much better than I do headphones and I'm just not sure what I should really be looking at when trying to better my gaming audio.

I currently have a 2.1 speaker set, which is fine for how I use it, and the Plantronics Gamecom 780 USB headset. I'm just using onboard audio. For the most part the headset works fine and the mic seems great to me, but I do sometimes have trouble with directional sound while gaming and I can't help but feel like I'm missing something. I've never spent a lot on headphones so I don't have anything to really compare to. When looking at non USB headphones I've considered the ATH-AD700X which I heard tons of good things about for directional sound, but heard the bass is lacking and the wings supports are flimsy.

Where do I start? Soundcard? Which one? Maybe a amp and DAC unit like the Fiio Olympus? What's a good all around headphone that won't cost an arm and a leg? Does something like the modmic really compare with a headset mic that has background noise cancelling abilities?

Check out dslyecxi on YouTube. He's part of a ARMA comunity and has a range of videos on ARMA 2 and ARMA 3.

For $3K+ I would hope so. Laptops are different though as you can't really build your own.

I agree with the others on the base Alienware desktop though. That won't be able to play BF4 anywhere close to high or ultra settings and the upgrade to a card that can is astronomical. OP you should make another thread with your gaming PC budget along with what else will be needed (OS, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.) and let forum members piece something together for you on PCpartpicker.com.

Lol. It is fun. I keep waiting for someone to tell me they or their kid want to start gaming/get a gaming pc so I can offer to do it for them.

I use my PC for more than just gaming and internet.

So, I buy the SSD to load some programs faster, I get the low noise case, I have 3 hard drives, and I get the higher end GPU so I know it can handle what I throw at it.

DayZ got me to buy the game, but what I keep going back for is Wasteland. Even when I have ARMA 3 I still prefer 2.

Ended up finding the full error message in windows and turns out it was referring to virtual memory. Checked my page file and it was down to 1024MB (I think because at one point the amount of available space on my drive was down to around 1GB). I upped that, so hopefully it will alleviate the problem. Didn't get to test it yet, but will probably get a chance this coming weekend. Wish me luck.

Recently learned about downsampling and buckshots so I thought I would try a bit. So, these are screenshots of ARMA 3 and Battlefield 4 taken at 3840 x 2160 and downscaled to 1920 x 1080. Not sure if GS forums does it justice.