IntroductionI am a PC enthusiast and enjoy putting together computers, modding them, and subsequently writing about it. I am also the tinkering owner of two PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 video cards that I have used now for over a year. This is the story of how I worked to break through the overclocking ceiling that was being limited by the stock BIOS.I picked the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 cards as my purchase choice because they are amazing workhorses. They are factory overclocked at 1040/1350 MHz core and memory and are competitively priced compared to other manufacturers. They are also differentiated from reference R9 290s cards due to the additional 50 millivolts of voltage that has been added to their core voltage and a heavy cooler which make them great overclockers. I have been able to overclock the pair of cards to 1120/1450 MHz core and memory until one of the...
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The drop in oil prices lead to a cheap Canadian dollar which in turn led to a an amazingly frugal Canadian vacation! We enjoyed our trip and would highly recommend our fellow skiers and snowboarders to check out the Big 3 in Banff. Click to view the above video in glorious 60 fps!

Mojave National Preserve and Capitol Reef National ParkWe recently bought a Subaru Forester and we decided to take it out on a crazy winter road trip to view our national treasures: our National Parks and Preserves!

A year ago I migrated an old Qt4 project to Qt5. The migration was relatively painless and a huge success with the exception of the QGLWidget powered OpenGL canvas. In Qt5, this widget has been deprecated and currently mangles text rendering on Mac OS X retina displays as shown below:The only way to fix the mangled text is to migrate to the QOpenGLWidget that was introduced in Qt 5.4.0. Overall, this widget is pretty similar to QGLWidget and Qt has done a decent job describing the differences as well as providing an example of working code.With that information in hand, I decided to try my luck migrating it over the weekend where I ran into some trouble. Here are some of the more annoying differences that I discovered:qglColor(), qglColorClear(), bindTexture(), and renderText() are not available.QPixmaps aren’t supported anymore and you need to substitute QOpenGLTexture.updateGL() has been renamed to update()Blending seems...
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The ASUS MG279Q was released with much fanfare because it was the first 144 Hz IPS panel that supported FreeSync. If you looked beyond the MG279Q quality control issues (and subsequently won the panel lottery) the only problem with this display was a limited FreeSync range of 35-90 Hz.A lot of people questioned why buy a 144 Hz IPS monitor if they would be effectively limited gaming to 90 fps (frames per second) but no other solutions existed. Luckily, a German hacker discovered that you could extend the range of FreeSync by modifying the EDID portion of the monitor driver. The total FreeSync range could now be extended beyond 35-90 Hz to 31-110 Hz or 54-144 Hz!FreeSync excelled at providing smooth gaming at low frame rates so a lot of gamers usually picked the 31-100 Hz option. Gamers were overjoyed with the November release of the Crimson drivers made that old...
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