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PC Gaming Is Still Way Too Hard (vice.com)
Motherboard has an article in which it argues that PC gaming is still way too hard. The author of the article claims that for one to build a gaming PC, they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income, and also have an unreasonable amount of time to "research, shop around, and assemble parts" for their computer. The author adds that a person looking into making one such gear also needs to always have to keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new PC games. The author has shared the experience he had building his own gaming PC. An excerpt from it: The process of physically building a PC is filled with little frustrations, and mistakes can be costly and time consuming. I have big, dumb, sausage fingers, so mounting the motherboard into the case, and screwing in nine (!) tiny screws to keep it in place in a cramped space, in weird angles, where dropping the screwdriver can easily break something expensive -- it's just not what I'd call "consumer-friendly." This is why people buy from Apple. It designs everything from the trackpad to the box the computer comes in, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need. Apple reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the RAM on her iMac, and it can do this because it controls everything that goes in that box.That's accurate. But it also means -- at least as of today -- that the current Apple computer -- MacBook Air, MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini you purchase packs in at least three-year-old components.
Didn't take long to find this little jewel to solve all your problem : https://pcpartpicker.com/
Elok
Are they overpriced? Sure. But they're prebuilt if you're too lazy, and the price per performance is still way beyond, say, an Apple laptop.
Sadly, most players will never make the switch because they rightly assume that it's too much of a headache. I can tell you with some authority, it is.
Any whitebox seller has a "pick your parts" option where they will assemble and basic test your machine for a small fee.
Also they generally have a few level of systems with recommended builds, standard, business, gamer, extreme-gamer.
You get a lot of value for just using a simple white boxer to do the gathering of components for you.
You don't have to buy a case that comes with "nine tiny screws." You don't have to overclock.
Buy a thousand-watt power supply rated to 90% efficiency, a current-series midrange GPU, some DDR3 RAM, whatever Intel processor / motherboard combo is on sale on Black Friday, and a SSD and you're most of the way to an affordable gaming rig that will last you longer than a console cycle.
Alienware (*a Dell subsidiary) and other companies like them exist for this purpose. Or, go down to your local computer store and buy one of their pre-built gaming PCs. Or, if you still want to pick components, pay for their installation service.
Plus sites like Newegg will recommend other components based on which motherboard you buy. There's still a few potential pitfalls, but all-in-all it's not THAT hard to build a PC. You can also just buy a whole rig, and swap out parts later when the need arises...
I mean, sure, occasionally a game like Doom 3 comes out that is beyond it's time in hardware specs, but my computer at home has 3 year old parts, and I have no problem playing new releases. Sure, sometimes I can't play them on the absolute highest settings, but I've never really felt that the game was less fun because of that. Also, the only real limiting factor to that issue is my video card, and a $200 could easily fix that if I felt the need - much cheaper than a new console.
This "article" screams intern assignment. The premise is predetermined and everything that goes against it is ignored. There are so many part pickers and guides available through a single search it's frustrating and stupefying that someone would even try writing this.
Likewise, building a PC now is nothing close to what it used to take. How would have this person felt trying to configure their IRQ interrupts? Not well, I'm guessing.
All told, it is sad that /. even allowed this to be submitted. This is an article in search of something to be upset about.
Is just a euphemism for Vice Magazine, the embearded/bespectacled Brooklyn hipster rag that loves to hate everything, except for drugs. I'm surprised they didn't do an article about glue sniffing in Serbia and focused on PC gaming.
Yes, of course it's unreasonably expensive if you get a $450 video card and a 1TB SSD. What were they expecting to discover? That water is wet?
I've built several dozen pcs over the last 16-17 years and I enjoy it, especially gaming pcs. It's like building a hot rod, and every time I just have to see how fast it goes, because it automatically becomes the new fastest pc I have ever built.
I can understand the author's point of view, but don't relate to it at all. Having built my own pcs for several years now is a point of personal pride, because I've learned enough to do it well, and I don't mind keeping up with the latest tech news about the latest innovations.
I'm the opposite of an Apple user, let me pick and choose exactly what I want for my hardware and software, it's more cost-effective and more gratifying in the long run.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Having a niche hobby can be expensive and inconvenient.
#DeleteChrome
1. PC gaming is the same price as console gaming for the hardware and cheaper for the games. A PC in your home is a zero sum game. You will own one. The cost of a PC gaming machine is the cost of a PC gaming system minus the cost of a conventional PC. A console will run you perhaps 300~400 USD. Add 300 to 400 to the cost of a PC and you have a reasonable gaming PC.
2. As to difficulty, the difficulty of PC gaming is only difficult if you don't know how to use a computer. The difficulty of PC gaming minus again the assumed competence with a PC which you should have anyway is about zero.
3. If you're talking about how hard the actual game is... adjust settings or get good, noob.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just pick the parts and ask the shop staff to put them together and you're golden. How hard it could be?
Also you don't really have to stay "at the bleeding edge" or something. PC games don't just dissappear when some new hardware appears on the market. Unlike console ones.
If you want to play anything more complex than Solitaire, go to the arcade!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
it's just not what I'd call "consumer-friendly." This is why people buy from Apple. It designs everything from the trackpad to the box the computer comes in, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need.
Article is comparing a ready-made system of a collection of parts and claiming the ready-made system is easier. Gee, I wonder why that is. It's like saying "This is why people buy Toyota, so they don't need to assemble a car themselves". And why pick Apple? Why not pick Asus, Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, or Lenovo? There are many other companies that sell PCs already assembled.
This guy sounds like an idiot. You can purchase ready-made gaming PCs. A typical consumer doesn't do their own RAM upgrades or any upgrades for that matter. Blah blah blah Apple... blah blah easy Apple... what ever. Apple makes some well performing machines but they don't focus on gaming. This guy should stick with consoles or just STFU.
... into having to understand technology, I just want to be stupid corporate slave and have my technological rights taken away. Give me the apple walled in garden for iphone for PC, make sure future software is inaccessable and run in encrypted sandboxes with heavy drm... I just can't be bothered said the masses, I rather be fleeced, spied upon, and get permission from big corp to use my own devices.
For those of us that prefer PC gaming, it's a labour of love, nothing less. I rather enjoy tracking down various parts and assembling them as a whole and then knowing that how well my rig performs is based on my skills at researching as well as my preferences at the time. Unlike a console, I can take a PC rig and make it into anything to suit my mood or needs as a gamer.
It's like my friends who are into Amatuer Radio. Sure, they can buy ready-to-go kits, but half the fun is assembling the pieces into something that suits you.
No thank you. I'll keep my PC. My kids can use the console, although I have a son who is showing a very real set of tech skills at a particularly young age. He's fascinated with robots, their inner workings, and computers in general. The iPad is fun to him, but building things challenges him -- and this is sadly missing from the education of most children these days. Things are too easy. We've gotten away from the hunter/gatherer mindset which challenged people to a lifestyle of ease and total dependence. A little challenge is good for us, all, yeah?
It's been a while since I built a gaming rig, but most of my time researching was on finding the best price to performance parts I could get. Or was willing to spend at the time. I don't have dainty fingers either. But I've worked on a lot of engines and such in my day, as well as played several musical instruments . So I suppose I my finger dexterity is above average. Still, if you're planning on a gaming rig, you don't chose a cramped case. I also found that I usually could run most, if not all games at maximum settings for at least two years. Generally a video card upgrade at the 2 to 3 year mark will extend the useful life for another year or two.
I'm not sure how a Mac is going to be relevant. Do current games get released for Mac these days? Also, I've read that they are starting to solder the RAM into them in lower end products. How in the hell is that something that a "mother" could upgrade? Or is she an electrical engineer or something?
http://www.asus.com/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/Desktops-Products/
There you go, no thinking needed.
My god what kind of screwdriver does this guy use? I can count the number of time I dropped my screwdriver inside my computer case over the years.
I have big, dumb, sausage fingers, so mounting the motherboard into the case, and screwing in nine (!) tiny screws to keep it in place in a cramped space, in weird angles, where dropping the screwdriver can easily break something expensive
Plus it isn't that expensive depending on what type of gaming you do. 1080p gaming. 800 dollars will be more than enough in most instances. The most difficult part is picking the parts that best suit your needs/desires while keeping an eye on your budget.
All those complaints are what make it fun. Buy a console if you don't want to learn about components. Tom's Hardware has the answer to just about anything you need to know.
Building a PC to game with isn't hard and it's not that expensive. I built my PC 3 years ago for ~$1500, and it's still performing very well and I get 144fps on CS:GO. A new mobo+ram+processor+watercooler will probably cost close to 700, but I can still use my monitor, keyboard, mouse, case, and psu. New graphics cards are coming in around 300 bucks, too. If you want to have the best graphics while gaming competitively, then yes, that's expensive. However, most people play with the graphics turned low in order to have higher fps. Also, lowering graphics can also help with seeing an opponent around a corner/hill or through grass/trees better. Physically, assembling a pc is fairly easy provided you are using a mid-tower case (not very cramped, good air-flow), which anyone would for a gaming pc. The screws are easy to use and put in. Also, the screws go from the back of the case to the mobo, so there is no risk of dropping the screwdriver on anything. If you do drop a screwdriver, you're not going to break anything expensive unless you're an idiot and drop it from 10ft and it's a big, heavy screwdriver. The hardest part of assembling my pc was putting in the case-lighting, which I have turned off most of the time anyway.
That guy has no business complaining about building a PC. There is this little thing called "research", learn the definition of it, then do it.
He's someone us IT guys loath because he thinks he knows what he's doing and he won't listen to advice from the pros. I have fat fingers too and have ZERO problem building something from scratch. It's not hard once you know how it goes together. Which is the real issue here, he doesn't know what he's doing so he's complaining about his clumsiness. There are tools to help you get the job done man.
Next he'll be ripping into his engine block and bitching about how it's put together and needing specialty tools just to loosen or get to some bolts.
Why is this posted anywhere that has an audience of more than 20 people? Oh yes, this is what we get with "social" media. Everyone can reach everyone else instead of him just bitching into the wind on a BBS of 20 people who don't care and aren't listening to him.
To spec out vs. a console which has literally no options, so yeah its harder. To say it's hard is another matter. There are plenty of off-the-shelf gaming PC's which will meet most people's needs, but the chief requirement (for the upgrade cycle) is learning how to plug in the components, which has gotten significantly easier over my lifetime of computers.
I'd say the hardest upgrades are motherboard and CPU. Motherboard because of CPU's and CPU's because they have those dang twist latches to fuse the cooling sink to the motherboard/chip assembly. I feel like I'm about to breaking the board every time I do it. That said, replacing the CPU/Mobo should be a once-decade affair at this point. My last upgrade was 2011 and there's no immediate need to replace it given the games I play. Go 'mid-range' all the way and be happy! Unless you're going to the ghetto'est of the ghetto to build your rig, sales staff will help to make sure you're buying components that are compatible with one another.
Speculation: Someone's getting some well earned 'native advertising' from Microsoft money in the lead-up to the next console rev upgrade coming this/next year.
Bye!
lolwut.
You can just buy ready made gaming pc's off the shelf. You don't have to build done yourself. That's what enthusiasts do! Like car enthusiasts who tinker under the hood all the time, and get aftermarket mods installed. That's what pc gamers do.
End consumers can just buy a ready made pc, install steam and off they go...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Yeah, and I wanted a jet trainer so badly, but couldn't afford it. And a spaceship. Come on, you live in a car-obsessed country (I wonder how many people heed this advice), and a decent desktop PC is still many times cheaper, what's there to cry about?
Ezekiel 23:20
Hear all about it next on action news. "Moran has problem building his on PC film at eleven on Vice!"
I used to have a lot of respect for vice and thought they were the last of the real news originations, but they just threw that down the drain on this worthless piece.
Yeah, c'mon. I mean if you can't manage 9 (!!!) screws, why even bother putting your own PC together?
And it's certainly not like you can just buy one. Oh wait, that's too expensive for a gaming machine. Because it's not like we can use the PC for anything else.
Let's be real, I'd need a PC anyway. I paid $80 for a service that used PC part picker with me to put together something with good performance that was within my budget. A console would just be extra money down the drain and I can't always use the games from the old console when a new one comes out, unlike with, say, Steam or GoG. And I can choose when to upgrade, rather than losing things because the next generation console came out and is the new shiny.
If I want a 'performance vehicle', I can go out and purchase a 'sports car' from a low-end Mustang to a high-end exotic. I could buy a kit car, or piece together a build starting with a frame/body. If you want to get into 'PC Gaming', but don't want to be a 'tech-head', there are MANY options to give you a decent 'gaming PC' without spending lots of cash or custom building a rig. Apple is a good example. Or just buying a Dell.
Came here to say this!
"This is why people buy from Apple" the article writer does know there are pre built PCs on the market, right?
Custom self build is always harder. This dude is bitching about 9 screws? If you do not want to use screws and you are doing self build you bought the wrong case. In fact you are probably doing it wrong building it yourself. You do not want to build it yourself. You just want to have better parts. Splash a bit o cash and have someone do it for you.
If I decide to build my own car/house/computer/whatever I expect it to take a bit longer and to be *WAY* more of of a PITA. I am not an expert on building any of those things. I will have to learn how to do it.
Now if I buy something pre-built it may not be exactly what I want but probably is 'close enough'. Where maybe a part swap or two and it is very close to what I want.
Oh wait you can
http://www.alienware.com/
Not for you ? Oh if only there were someplace that would let you pick your components and they would build the PC for you
https://www.google.com/search?...
Tooo hard to figure out what you need ? If only there were a guide of some kind
http://www.tomshardware.com/
http://www.hardocp.com/
Applel, gib job, plz!
If anyone could join, it would be called the PC Master Club.
Just buy a PS4, it got a PC inside but the mobo only has 8 screws. Perfect!
just buy an alienware or comparable man, no need to be a complete moron about this topic
I'm disabled. While it may be true that I have an unreasonable amount of time to waste, my disposable income is incredibly tight. Despite this, I have a gaming rig, built a few years ago, that still runs most new games with excellent stability and decent performance at 1080p. All told, it cost about $700, which means something better than this one should be significantly cheaper right now. Me and my friend threw the parts list together in the matter of a few hours, because my previous rig had just shit the bed and I needed something in a hurry.
If you can't build a passable gaming PC, you're incompetent, lazy, or both.
Did the person who wrote TFA even look for consistency in their article? Who the fuck says you need to build your own? There are tons of options for buying pre-built gaming PCs, so getting into PCs is no more difficult than knowing how to order shit online. And did he just seriously mention gaming and Apple computers in the same paragraph? Just casually browsing newegg I managed to configure a custom pre-built PC in 5 minutes that would absolutely skull fuck anything currently sold by Apple at twice the price in gaming performance.
Cars have been around for over 100 years, why are they still so hard to build? It's so much easier to buy them pre-assembled.
Didn't take long to find this little jewel to solve all your problem : https://pcpartpicker.com/
How the fuck am I supposed to click that? I have big, dumb, sausage fingers!
PC gaming is a racist, sexist bastion of white male privilege and clearly consoles are the socially just platform of choice because they have a more diverse market.
There's plenty of "boutique" system builders out there that will build you a PC for almost at cost. For example, with NCIX you can add a simple $50 and they will build the PC for you. It's also simple enough to just go on a PC community forum where you just give simple info such as budget and your needs, with people giving you a detailed list on PCpartpicker for all you need.
Great site...I really like their price vs time charts.
For example Samsung 1TB EVO SSD, now about 318 bucks, in march and April it was 290.
They have lots of example builds with just about any component you might want-to check for compatibility.
Also the NewEgg reviews, you can search for compatibility comments.
Building PC's by yourself, for gaming or not, is half the fun. Be thankful that you CAN build those and choose the components for yourself, instead of having to settle for ready-made computers like Apple cr*p!
An 11 year old god damn kid has learned the nomenclature of board repair and learned to diagnose a faulty electronic motherboard, in a fluent and logical manner that even some adults with tech jobs and tech diplomas lack,
and you are telling me that spending a single fucking day on the first few Google articles of "Desktop Components", "How does desktop hardware work?", and "What to look for in gaming hardware?", and any of the over a thousand PC building videos that explain everything neatly and in a detailed manner,
IS HARD FUCKING WORK?
HOW MENTALLY RETARDED DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO NOT HAVE THE MENTAL CAPACITY TO PUT LEGO BLOCKS TOGETHER WITH A MANUAL TO BOOT?
HOW FUCKING MENTALLY HANDICAPPED CAN YOU BE THAT YOU CAN'T FIND THE PATIENCE TO READ A FEW WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES AND A FEW "HOWTO" ARTICLES IN ORDER TO GET 1/100th OF THE TECH LITERACY AN 11 YEAR OLD KID ALREADY HOLDS OVER YOU?
HITLER, THE WORLD NEEDS YOU BACK
Gee, if only geeks would share their knowledge. Oh wait, they already do:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMas...
I've been building custom PC gaming rigs since the early 90's. This isn't rocket science. You spend a few minutes doing research -- or if you are really lazy
* http://www.tomshardware.com/t/...
Hell, if you can't even be bothered to think one could always go with Dell / Alienware.
If you don't want to build the PC, buy one with a decent video card. Dell has plenty, FFS. This isn't goddamn rocket science, it's just more vox/vice garbage clickbait. For a site called motherboard you would think they would be a little more attuned to their reader base.
I wish the author had defined what they consider reasonable because without that the article has no meaning.
I mean, you can argue the point, but to me it has never been easier or more affordable to build a gaming PC. Hell you don't even need a screwdriver anymore, everything clicks together like Lego bricks now - which I guess is how I fell for this click-baity article - by clicking and reading the damn thing to try and determine how far the intersection between cranium and rectum were.
crazy dynamite monkey
Building the PC is a very small part of the problem. Once you've assembled the PC you have to test it. The tools used to test equipment vary by manufacturer and the process is far from cut-n-dry. Not all the tests are going to be intuitive, especially if you've shorted the system board out on one of those brass standoffs (which I've done before). Once you've found your machine to have no physical defects you have to software test it. No way pcpartpicker.com can tell you that the driver stack for build X has driver support for Y to enable game Z.
Surprisingly if you think that moving to a laptop makes it easier (hey, they picked the parts AND drivers for you!!) you're going to be unpleasantly surprised. Graphics drivers for laptops are highly custom and infrequently updated so you'll always be 6 months behind the bleeding edge of fixes. This means your high-end graphics experience is pretty much guaranteed to be buggy. For me this meant that Warhammer had garbage minimap textures pretty much the whole time I owned it and played it. Yes, it's possible to get bleeding edge drivers that *might* work with your laptop but again this is trial and error. People seem to forget that time spent is time spent once they've spent it.
I recently bought a HP workstation which I'm also using for gaming in a VM. Setting up the VM was time-consuming and technically involved. The system board in the workstation was fried on day-1 so I had to set up my ESD workstation and order in parts to rebuild the machine. Combined with a full time job, diagnostics, tech support, ordering parts and delivery schedules the whole process of running DOOM took about 3 weeks to 1 month. Your average gamer expects to buy a console at 9am, install DOOM at 9:30am and be playing by 9:45am on the same day. Clearly my process will not work for this person but you'd be surprised how many people do this and then tell the average gamer "You should set it up in a Linux VM, it's EASY!". These people miss the fact they enjoyed the technical challenge more than the game.
So then, what's the problem here?
Oh sure, pick the iMac for your example. You're not even saying which iMac you're talking about, so you might even be wrong in your argument.
The Macbook comes with 8GB of memory built in. RAM is not upgradable in this model.
The 11-inch MacBook Air comes with 4GB of memory built in. If you feel you may need 8GB in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase, as RAM is not upgradable in this model. The 13-inch MacBook Air comes standard with 8GB of memory built in.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display comes with 8GB of memory built into the computer. If you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase, because memory cannot be upgraded later in this model.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display comes with 16GB of memory built in. RAM is not upgradable in this model.
The 21.5inch iMac comes with 8GB of memory built into the computer. If you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase, because memory cannot be upgraded later in this model.
The Mac mini comes with 4GB of memory. If you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase, because memory cannot be upgraded later in this model.
Only the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display and the Mac Pro can have their RAM upgraded by the user.
And since this the topic is "gaming" and most Macs only have the Intel built-in GPU, I don't even see why you'd use any Mac as a comparison to building your own PC.
The real alternatives to building your own gaming PC are the Alienware and others. Besides, who ever said that getting a gaming PC was supposed to be easy? You want easy, get a console from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo - you also get auto-aim in first-person shooters to compensate for the crap analog sticks of the gamepads.
For prices similar to Apples, and a frustation free experience.
Dumb article for sure.
+Voodoo was bough by HP and does not exist as a separate brand, but I do not know how are HP Ink's (pun intended) Gaming PCs marketed nowadays
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
There are services that build to of the line PCs with the latest and greatest in them - but you'll pay a premium. Sourcing your own components and coming up with a build that fits your needs is where you save money. You either do labor and pay less or pay more for convenience. The basics of economics there.
With a gaming PC leave off the case. No more scrapped knuckles. If it is something you tinker with a lot there is no point to it, or get an open "bench test" case. If anyone asks about the pile of stuff and water cooling pipes that is my gaming pc, I just mumble "open computing". If all your artwork is hung not level and not square with the ceiling, and all he furniture not square with the walls and no case on your computer you will find all sorts of annoying people won't bother to visit. Or if they really have to visit they will at least keep their eyes closed.
You either game with a mouse and keyboard or you don't!
If you can follow Lego instructions then you can build a PC.
You certainly can build a budget gaming PC - see pcpartspicker - it's easier than ever now to piece a new rig together.
Agree with the "tiny hands required" statement however. Why do all PC makers think everyone has tiny fingers? Why are motherboard to case plugs not standardized into one giant group of pins yet?
You expect the same people who can't perform a basic Google search to know how to have knowledge of a screwdriver? Good grief, I need both a Standard and Phillips screwdriver. Needle nosed pliers, and even a flashlight. Don't even get me started on to sniff, or not sniff the aluminum paste...
That is way too much work for the average person. Why not build my own refrigerator you insensitive clod!?!
was intended as snark, just in case it's not obvious enough..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Exactly the things I wanted to mention. Why waste time when many people have spent lots of their time with coming up with balanced builds?
Ezekiel 23:20
Just mash your keypad to order the dailing wand.
Motherboard has an article in which a clueless moron types a bunch of words about things they don't understand, and didn't even extend the reader the courtesy of a 5-minute google search to try and understand. Perhaps they're merely recalling complaints by similarly clueless acquaintances from years past?
TL;DR author is an idiot.
Building a modern computer is as easy as putting LEGOs together, and a plethora of sites and services exist to make picking the right parts for the right pricepoint as easy as clicking a link.
Haven't been keeping current with PC trends? Ask a friend, or go on to a forum with computer enthusiasts and ask some questions. Generally people like talking about their hobbies and might help you piece together a decent rig or already have a dream upgrade planned for themselves.
The cost of a high-end smart phone and a weekend are unreasonable?
I build a new PC only every 3-5 years with only a few parts upgrades now and then during that time. Yeah, it takes a few hours to research and purchase parts and then a few hours to assemble it all but you end up with something far better than any console. It takes no effort to stay up to specs for new games. I'm still on a 4770K and it still plays games just fine.
Jokes about the weakness of the article aside, a new case standard would be useful to reduce cramped building conditions that really do lead to errors.
Except you literally can't anymore. Apple has been making it harder to impossible to swap components without an Apple certified repair specialist.
My work laptop is a 13-inch Retina model (MacBookPro11,1 for those interested), which I bought with 8 GB of RAM to reduce cost with plans to upgrade it later if it proved worthwhile. It did indeed prove to be a worthwhile need, but I realized afterward that Apple now solders on the RAM now. They have been transitioning to doing this with all of their lineup, including iMacs.
Maybe it's the ignorance factor, but who in their right mind thinks water cooling is a great idea for a first build? I mean, really, this is overkill. And when an article says "This makes the 1070 a no-brainer, and its release is a good excuse to build a new PC, *but I wasn't going to spend time researching other PC parts.*" near the beginning I find the viewpoint of the entire thing the be skewed. A non-technical friend of mine just built his own rig for similar reasons and loved it and is chomping at the bit for his next build. Because he wasn't overzealous and blindly following some guide because he was too lazy to design his own rig. Which, really, isn't _that_ complicated.
Dude, a guy from motherboard named website that finds screwing in (actually very reasonably sized) motherboard screws into a case is too hard? Where do they find these worthless lib-arts degree losers to write articles for them?
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
This guy must belong on the silly generation, save your time click baiting, just read this below.
Let's take for example the manual for my—brace yourself—"ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus VIII Hero" motherboard. As you can tell by its ridiculous name, this thing is being marketed specifically to people who are building PCs to play games, but there's no easy-to-find "quick setup guide." Instead, there's an inscrutable 160-page manual that didn't help me find out where to plug in anything.
How ridiculous is this?! , why is this even on Slashdot, this is an insult to everyone intelligence.
You don't have to run every game at over 70fps.You don't have to buy the highest spec corei7. It's like buying a car, you don't have to have a Bugatti or a complicated but cheap to buy kit car to enjoy a track day at your local circuit. An easier or cheaper machine can still be fun. Maybe less performance but the compromise to be made is much the same. Sure there are experts who are mechanics by day who can build a Caterham themselves on a shoestring with cheap parts from scrapyard's etc. But that's just how it is.
If anything the compromises are easier these days because computing is cheaper. I'm sure there are many here who forked out huge money for Pentium 1 at ~200mhz and then discovered the game they wanted to play needed an additional 3DFX Voodoo2 card etc. I remember my first computer was £1612 Irish Pounds and voodoo card was probably another 150 or 200. Probably several month average salary in today's terms. Even before the Dell XPS and Alienware a good gaming computer didn't come cheap. RAM is cheaper, storage is a lot cheaper now.
But most games now want to reach as large a target audience as possible so most games will work fine on a meagre hardware if you turn down the detail and accept it isn't going to perform like a beast without some effort and learning.
It's not like modern pcs even need to set jumpers to assign IRQ and so on. Things are much more accessible than ever for the budding homebuild pc enthusiasts.
I stopped "building" PC's over 15 years ago. There's literally no point, you end up with problems and incompatibilities and extra expense and - in the end - you get a PC that you can't upgrade any further than any other.
Yet I have 1000+ games on Steam, and god knows how many on other services and discs, etc. You just buy good commodity hardware and - although not "obvious" to complete amateurs, you should know if you've ever googled - a decent video card.
Last time someone I heard of that didn't have any PC experience tried to build a PC it was a mess, but because the guy was an idiot. They phoned my technician (who's a gamer), asked what to buy, then ignored all that and tried to cobble together something themselves.
They ended up with a shit AMD card, an underpowered processor and a PSU that could never have handled it. That's NOT what my guy recommended to them, in fact it's the opposite and for much cheaper they could have got a decent PC built, certified and warranted to work for the next few years.
It's not hard to do PC gaming, it's not hard to buy a gaming PC, but it is hard to be one of those overclockers, one of those people who builds all their own PC's, and uses all the "cool" tech to get ahead of the game, especially if you're an idiot who thinks it's all just modular and plug-and-play.
As someone who grew up with ISA cards, ports, I/O, etc. I can do anything that is required. But I stopped building my own a long time ago. I never even had an "expensive lesson" because of a mistake. My builds all worked. But it's too much faffing. I don't even know (or care) what the processor sockets are any more. I just buy off-the-shelf, but decent, hardware, pre-built, with a warranty.
It's kept me running on everything from Half-Life to GTA V without any problems. And it's been upgraded several times since (SSDs, etc.).
And, out of all my Steam friends, including all the overclockers and show-offs, the person with the most play time on their machine? Me. The person who's played the most games? Me. The person who buys the most games? Me.
I'd rather spend my money on one decent machine and then spend what I would have spent on all the junk and minor upgrades over the years on actual games to, you know, play stuff. The days of having the time to piss about worrying about PSU rail draw, etc. are long gone, precisely because I just want to play.
So PC gaming isn't hard at all. Just buy a gaming machine. Or get a decent "business" machine and maybe get (or slap) a half-decent nVidia in it. Hell, if you're that worried, buy a Steam machine. Most of those will play anything you throw at them.
What's hard is being a PC gamer as a broke teenager, or trying to build something that will beat all your friend's machines. You used to have to make-do and upgrade piecemeal and make the best of what came your way. Nowadays, anything you get in the shops with the right video card is just fine, and if you are really stuck, get one of those gaming PC websites to build one for you. It'll cost more than a console, but you'll get more out of it than you ever would a console.
Change the interface of cards so that they are T type connectors that cards slip in. Motherboard and cards all have a metal plate at the back (not the bottom, the back) which thumb screws into the case or even simple locking tabs. Need to swap a motherboard? Lift the locking panel on the front of the case, Unscrew the two thumb screws and remove the motherboard card from the case.
What about fans, on case temp readings, lights, etc? When the motherboard slides into the case it's own connector slides into the connector for the case bus which can largely take the form of stickers with copper paths on them inside the case. Don't really need wires in your case at all.
Next problem?
The author of the article claims that for one to build a gaming PC, they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income, and also have an unreasonable amount of time to "research, shop around, and assemble parts" for their computer.
Or they could just buy a pre-made gaming PC. You might be able to save a few dollars by putting one together yourself, but if you're worried about all the time and effort spent, and having "sausage fingers" that can't seat a motherboard, buying an already-assembled system is an option.
It's not necessarily that expensive, even-- the Alienware Alpha, for example, starts at $500. It's not the most powerful system ever, but it'll play an awful lot of PC games.
The author adds that a person looking into making one such gear also needs to always have to keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new PC games.
Well yes, if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you need to spend money to stay there. Not necessarily time, since there are companies who will build you a pretty cutting-edge system for a price. But money, yes, you have to spend money to stay on the cutting edge. However, you don't need to stay on the cutting edge. You can buy a $1000 system and play games on it for several years. Even a $1000 gaming rig will play most mainstream games at medium or high graphics settings, at playable frame rates. It might not play the most demanding games on "ultra high" at 100fps, but honestly, you can do it. My pattern for the past couple decades has been to buy a $1000 system every 5 years, updating the video card to whatever I can get for $200 halfway through the lifecycle. I haven't really had trouble playing games.
What is being described isn't "PC Gaming" - it's BUILDING a gaming PC.
Those aren't the same things.
Yes, sure, if you buy your components and build it yourself, you might save a little money (less now than you used to, IMO). But guess why? The difference is ... THE LABOR $ to build it. Surprise!
Want to do "PC gaming" without that effort? Just BUY a gaming computer. You don't even need a particularly great one anymore, unless you want to run your games at 4k.
Sager makes great laptops, or just go buy that Alienware freaky glowy-case one from Best Buy.
This is a really stupid article.
-Styopa
Not having read the article, I do believe there is a high bar for knowledge in any DIY computer build to come out the other end with a polished product. Case selection can be challenging when taking into consideration the size the video card(s), the length of the cables from the power supply, connector and power req's, header placement of internal ports to external peripherals, etc. Motherboards seem to offer a huge range of memory and CPU compatibility but it's certainly not difficult to get something that won't work if you're not paying attention. For people wanting to do it themselves much knowledge can be gained reading through the comments and reviews on Newegg and Amazon for what others have already built. At least you know what works. There are builder sites too for beginners that walk you through the process. As for cost, gaming computers for the masses are not much different than any quality computer. The types of parts you need are the same, just a higher spec in CPU/GPU which again, for most gamers adds a couple to a few hundred overall to a quality build. TFS seems to imply the top 1% types. These people don't care about stories like this anyway.
Not everything is for everyone. Not everyone is going to build a car. Not everyone will use a sewing machine. The assumption that it should be easy enough for anyone to do it is the unreasonable part here.
I just go to Alienware from my iPhone, click "Buy", and everything just works. And, it looks great, to boot.
Go spend about $2k on a gaming system, the graphics quality are much better that on a console and you get a computer that can do other things. As for the challenge of games.... actually games are getting to easy and no longer a game and more of a hit the button thing....
Games in hard mode need to be hard... the kind of hard where you need to stop mid game and start over because you over looked something....
The video hardware in Macs is absolutely USELESS for AAA gaming. And it can't be upgraded either.
This is not a problem with PC gaming. PC Gaming should not cater to the lowest common denominator, that's what consoles are for.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
It is so much easier to just go to a car dealership to buy a car than to build a kit car, so driving is way too hard.
FUCK YOU!
CASE-FUCKING-CLOSED.
I haven't looked at individual component reviews in over a decade, and in that time I've twice simply googled, selected a builder and ordered through their process and come up with a gaming PC that lasted about 5 years each go, for a couple hundred bucks more than a basic web and Office Dell, and half the price of an Apple machine of similar specs. The only hard time I had was finding one that installed Windows 7 when 8 had become the dominant (but poor) setup.
..this guy was around of the good old days of using dip switches to set IRQ and mem range. Then you had motherboards with LPT connectors, PS2 connectors, serial connectors. IDE controllers with the parallel cables, mylex power connectors and then for some reason floppy took a different kid of power connector. Oh and it had a floppy connector that looked like a smaller version of IDE. AT keyboard connectors....then the struggles of buying EDO RAM at $200 per 4MB stick and you had to do in pairs. Oh and don't forget all those little connectors if you wanted the LEDs on your case to work (power, HDD activity, etc). Then installing Windows.......in the days before PnP...where nothing was detected and no drivers (other than maybe mouse and keyboard) came pre-loaded on Windows. I made some serious coin back in the days assembling gaming rigs for people.... Easy $500/day back in 96-99
Ahh I miss those days.
Assembling a gaming rig today is a joke by comparison. BTW it seems to me the the writer is suggesting to basically buy a mac and be done with it. Sure, that can work, and you will be able to play most games on lowest settings possible, but then again so would a basic PC from BestBuy at 1/3 the cost. For the same money as a Macbook Pro 13" retina, I can build a mid-high end gaming rig that will blow it out of the water (and make most games playable at high/ultra).
I RTFA because I couldn't believe what the summary said. It's true, it's all true.
I don't know what parts of it angered me the most but the below comes close.
"Beginning to end, the whole process of building the computer took me almost five hours, and I had to make two emergency calls to PC Gamer's Fenlon during the process: once when I couldn't figure out why the case fans weren't spinning, and again when the computer didn't recognize an ethernet cable. I was literally bleeding from a cut on my hand by the end of it, which my YouTube guides said was common. I bled for this fucking thing. ...
But getting there was a nightmare. It is by far the most difficult product I've ever bought and put together. "
All I can say is that this "journalist" sounds like an entitled, whiny, moron who needs to STFU.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Stop playing the latest video games. Only play 4 year old stuff. Then any crummy whitebox you buy will be able to run them just fine, and all the games and drivers will have reached their final patch levels by the time you bother with them.
Someone had to do it.
I was planning to just mod up some comments about how stupid and wrong this all is, but I can't believe that someone actually seriously wrote this.
First of all, you don't need to constantly upgrade. I bought mine 3 years ago for less than $1000 (including monitor and SSD) and I'm still playing new games at 60FPS.
Then there is the whole thing of not having to put it together yourself. You can buy ready made gaming systems.
More costly than a console? Yes. But it's a PC. If that's not a plus for you, by all means, keep playing on a console.
And then he picks apple? The most expensive hardware ever created from a cost/performance standpoint?
I'm sitting firmly in middle age and still building my own machines. Assembled my latest a couple of years ago with components from Newegg, it's a Haswell based machine built specifically so that I could wander around in Skyrim. Nothing hard about it. And it's still a cool feeling the first time you fire it up.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
The problem is the concept of the "PC Master Race". You do not need a PC Master Race PC to be at the cutting edge of gaming, but you do need more than what Apple currently sells. The PC Master Race sets an impossible and unrealistic bar, those guys really do spend a lot of time and energy.
On the other hand, you need a top end CPU and a top end nvidia GPU, 16GB of ram and SSD. Apple does not sell that thing, nor any PC system company that I think actually does any real R&D, most of the ones that sell you this stuff will do "burn in", but that's not something worth the bucks they want to charge.
I've built over a thousand computers and I'm clumsy but never had a problem - I've even had staff bring their home builds to me where they hadn't even used the brass risers so it wouldn't boot but they still worked when fitted properly. I drop stuff, I don't earth myself - this stuff is pretty much like lego.
Back in the micro computer days it was way more flakey and frustrating. I do agree with the issues with keeping up to date on specs though.
This is where I think Steam machines can really shine. Console gamers don't want to deal with the sort of stuff in the article, a vast majority of them may be intimidated by it as well. Also with setup, there's dealing with viruses, corruption, and backups. Although not much of a problem in reality, these aren't the sort of things that console gamers want to put up with, rather just turning on their systems and playing right away.
I think Steam machines could really take off here, being a hybrid of both a console and a PC. I believe some models of Steam machines allow the user to upgrade its components as well. However, at the moment Steam OS is limited mostly due horrible pricing on what seems to be the majority of models. It could be said that games are a limiting factor as well but that's improving rapidly.
That was hard.
The guy is too stupid to get any of the thousands of teenagers who know how to build a desktop computer, to build one for him.
The guy is too stupid to order a service for these things to build a computer for him.
The guy is too stupid to spend a few hours on howstuffworks, newbcomputerbuild, logicalincrements, pcpartpicker, and any of the many youtube vids explaining how to build a computer in retard-proof ways, all the links being the first things users will dump for you if you ask for "PC building helpful links" whether on reddit or any god damn forum. That is, unless you are too stupid to actually go and ask for community help or do a simple google search.
The guy is too stupid to even define the relative levels of disposable income. $800 might be too much if you are begging mommy and daddy, but you are an adult who can do actual fucking jobs that would easily get that much money in a month at least with some god damn effort. Average hotel cleaner gets twice that at a minimum where i'm from (and that's not a 1st world country).
This guy, is the definition of total stupidity.
The first thing it complains about is not being able to easily screw the mainboard in to the case, but the plate the mainboard sits on is FUCKING REMOVABLE on virtually every case. This guy is a complete idiot if he tried to mount the mainboard with the backplate in the case.
Did you read what you wrote?
1. PC gaming is the same price as console gaming for the hardware
A console will run you perhaps 300~400 USD. Add 300 to 400 to the cost of a PC and you have a reasonable gaming PC.
You just negated yourself. If the console price is what you need to add to the price of a PC to make a "gaming" PC (for whatever that means to you) then it is not the same price as console gaming.
You are also ignoring the inconvenience factor of a PC for gaming. They don't regularly work well with TVs for displays as they are seldom set up for using one (and TVs seldom for being connected to PCs). Even if you overcome that problem you then have the problem of the PC in the living room, which if you knew anything about women you would know that is almost never a popular idea to have a loud gaming PC in the living room - compare to how quiet a gaming console is.
To bad that apple is all about thin and they under power the GPU's a bit for the screen size. And they have 5400 RPM HDD's in 1K+ systems.
Also it's said that mac pro had to be cut down as well. The old one had dual cpu and took full size video cards + ATI / NVIDIA put out drivers for newer cards as well.
The sad thing is in the past few years they have talked about gameing on the mac but there hardware was a bit lacking and now it's even thiner with higher end stuff taken out. Like my desktop really needs to be super thin with soldered ram with overpriced upgrades when you buy the system.
People fetishize PC hardware. Do you NEED to play Crysis at 4K at 90 FPS? No. But people get enjoyment out of trying to get more and more performance. The problem here is that the author is lumping the fetishists in with the regular game players.
Let the fetishists spend their money. Let the rest of the world play at 1080 resolution at 30 FPS.
Oh - Macs don't have three year old hardware. Don't be daft.
Lose some weight, fatso. And the article writer too...
Motherboard has an article in which it argues that car driving is still way too hard. The author of the article claims that for one to build a car, they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income, and also have an unreasonable amount of time to "research, shop around, and assemble parts" for their car. The author adds that a person looking into making one such gear also needs to always have to keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new racing tracks. The author has shared the experience he had building his own car. An excerpt from it:
The process of physically building a car is filled with little frustrations, and mistakes can be costly and time consuming. I have big, dumb, sausage fingers, so mounting the engine into the chassis, and screwing in nine (!) tiny screws to keep it in place in a cramped space, in weird angles, where dropping the screwdriver can easily break something expensive -- it's just not what I'd call "consumer-friendly." This is why people buy from Ford. It designs everything from the steering wheel to the door, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need. Ford reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the rims on her Transit, and it can do this because it controls everything that goes in that automobile.
Alienware = dell there are others out there that will build for you and give a lot more choice then dell and without that dell bios.
The guys says "Apple has 3 year old components", is that actually the case? When I look the iMac 27 inch on Apple's website under "technical specs" it mentions the i5 and i7 and just speeds (3.3GHz i5 turbo boost up to 3.9GHz) and when you finally put it in your the cart and go to "Check Out" it gives you the option for a 4GHz i7 Turbo boost up to 4.2GHz but no where does it say what chip you are actually getting. If I select the 4GHz i7 and 16GB model it totals $2,749 but it never really says what you're getting under the hood. For that price if I got a 4th or 5th Generation i7 I'd be pretty mad and it doesn't even offer an option for nVidia graphics, just AMD R9 M395 or M395X.
Isn't that why we have Steam Box, Alienware, and etc that specialize in building performance gaming hardware for consumer without the complexity?
If you want to custom build your PC that's your prerogative but to say it's too hard it's silly. That's like saying gaming on Linux is too hard. You have to pick the right Linux OS to play your game.
Seriously comparing PC gaming to pre-built Mac? Mac for gaming? WHAT? Apple can tell you that you cannot upgrade to latest video card because they refuse to support it. Single source vendor is not the solution. Comparing "unreasonable" amount of disposable income to build a PC to high premium pre-built Apple Mac seems rather ironic.
Getting 60+ fps on ultra settings in PC gaming doesn't even take that. An fast I5, Radeon R9 390, 16 GB of ram, and an HDD can get you that. I should know that's pretty much my PC. The CPU and Ram are both about $100-150, the GPU is down to around $250 with the coming of the RX480 (which is slightly slower), and even with a good case and power supply the whole thing comes to ~600-700. Price not including monitor since most modern tvs can even be a monitor (all things old are new again).
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
It's the other way around. People are stupid and can't be bothered to take their time and read instructions. Also this article is comparing custom built pc gaming rigs to a standard Mac that can't really be gamed on.
There's probably some wisdom to it. The damn standoffs are annoying, SATA cables are a bit to handle, your average CPU could use a better location so you could put a heatsink on easier, memory slots are still a pain to deal with and the pin connectors are too easy to bend, and so on and so forth.
Hell, just the location of the PSU has become a complication though, since most people are going bottom-mounted, making the current connector's usual location a bit of a pain.
Because it came from Motherboard.
Surprisingly if you think that moving to a laptop makes it easier (hey, they picked the parts AND drivers for you!!) you're going to be unpleasantly surprised. Graphics drivers for laptops are highly custom and infrequently updated so you'll always be 6 months behind the bleeding edge of fixes.
If you are grabbing your GPU drivers from your laptop manufacturer, you're doing it wrong. Grab them directly from Nvidia.
"But I don't have an Nvidia GPU!"
Then you're doing it wronger.
This is the way we like it. One person's chronic inability is another person's cornered market. You're playing right into our hands. :shiftseyesleftandright:
The only value you get out of gaming is actually learning something about a computer and how it works. Take that away and you are just blowing electrons and your life.
And still runs everything but the most flashy games at highest settings after dropping a new video card (2 times) over the life of the machine. The core machine is a i7-960 with 12GB of RAM.
Desktop gear isn't increasing in performance at geometric rates like in the 90s and early 00s.
Is it just me or does this read like a giant piece of bait? An article decrying the "difficulty" of getting into PC gaming when in the same article praising various sub reddits for their willingness to help?
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
So, he buy's Apple for gaming?
That's like saying, "I buy tomatoes for my fruit salad."
PC gaming is only super expensive if you want it to be, want blue-LED-lit cases, etc.
Buy off-lease or refurbished CAD/graphics workstations, upgrade as needed (usually just an SSD is needed).
My current rig was $354 for the PC itself, then another $80 for a Samsung SSD. It's handled everything I've thrown at it so far.
under sizing / getting crap PSU's is an other issue that people can hit as well. I know what I'm doing but some people just look at the wattage number. You don't want to cheap out and get a $29 900W psu.
Bloody stupid peasants.
Lol. Someone mod this up. +5 Funny.
I really can't tell if this is serious.
Is this ??? You seem to know way too much and way too little. But I'm not sure there was a joke in there.
Gaming in a VM ?
good troll I guess.
Plus sites like Newegg will recommend other components based on which motherboard you buy. There's still a few potential pitfalls, but all-in-all it's not THAT hard to build a PC. You can also just buy a whole rig, and swap out parts later when the need arises...
Also one don't need to keep up with the latest stuff. Neither the Apple machines or the gaming consoles do so.
To save money one should keep the case, PSU, HDD, SDD, ODD depending on what one want to use when upgrading but with a Mac you'd toss it all out so feel free to do that with a PC too I guess .. But it's stupid.
Cry me a fucking river.
Because nobody can buy a basic gaming box for about $800.
Nope. Just never happens.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/alien...
Never!
Hell, in most cases a pre-existing PC should be perfectly acceptable. Just make sure your PSU is 400W or more and has the necessary connectors.
Then drop $200 on a video card and you're gaming!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
It isn't hard. It's just the bar is set higher than "vegetable-level idiocy".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
any gamer that thinks getting a pc gaming rig going is "hard" is likely the kind that think anything but the cheesiest, easiest, laziest farming/grinding/leveling is also 'too hard'.
TOO BAD.
go back to your fucking consoles, the pc gaming world does not need nor want you.
That require this much of a rig?
The newest graphic card is great, but Im running on a 12 month old budget card (paid maybe $175 for it?) and it plays CSGO without any problems. No fancy solid state drive, etc.
I guess the big boys want 60fps; I never check my FPS but i literally never have any jitteryness or lag.
I find it kinda funny when they talk about price, actually.
A decent/usable gaming box, monitor, and mouse can be had for less than $500-$750. Buy the bits, plug them in, load the OS, and you're off to the races.
Meanwhile, that $200 console is going to need a $500-$1000(or more) big-screen TV (which will sit in your man-cave or mommy's basement, whichever), and if you want some l33t controllers that give you an edge in the game, that's gonna set you back at least $100 more - per controller. Of course, bad-assed headphone/mic set is de rigueûr, and that's gonna set you back from $35 to $100 extra or more... (Oh, and if you want a pretty cover for that controller to make you look bad-assed? that's an extra $150.)
Yeah... whatevs.
(also funny... my 2013-purchased MacBook Pro CPU/GPU is still more than capable of taking a CG render pounding that would turn most 2016-era laptop chips into a curl of smoke, so no worries on the 'OMG-you're-so-obsolete front.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You don't even need Alienware. A $600 Dell with 1TB hard drive and NVidia GeForce 730 will run most games you want to play fairly nicely. For a lot of games you can get away with something even cheaper.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A top-of-the-line video card is currently $700 (GTX 1080 Founder's Edition), and a top-of-the-line CPU is $1700 (i76950X 3 GHz), and you'd want an SSD and lots of memory, so you're talking at least $3000 for a high-end gaming PC, even if you do all the work yourself. On the bright side, you can now use that 4K TV you already have as a monitor. Of course, you don't need 10 cores for any current games, and you probably don't need a GTX 1080 unless you intend to do 60fps gaming in 4K resolution or hook up good VR goggles. For about $500, you could get a machine good enough to run Fallout 4 at 1920x1080 resolution.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Gaming in a VM ?
good troll I guess.
No troll. Gaming in a VM is fine, depending upon the game. If it's a AAA recent game, then no. On high end hardware, 4+ year old games play in VMs just fine, and no mucking about with your core OS.
Hardcore gamers WANT to have the bragging rights of the best machine, with the most massive feature list, tweaked and overclocked with the most attention to detail to give that extra 1% of performance
If that part isn't fun for you, then you miss an important part of the true hardcore gamer culture :) You can still have fun with commodity PCs, just don't expect to compete well against those who took the extra time and spent more money to have better gear ;)
You can buy gaming PCs and laptops from major OEMs now.
It's only too hard if you have problems using a credit card.
Oh, building your own? Yeah, that sounds like something an enthusiast would do. I guess maybe you need to learn a little if you want to do that.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
to the kitchen then. Or your barbies. Whichever one you prefer.
This is why people buy from Apple. It designs everything from the trackpad to the box the computer comes in, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need. Apple reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the RAM on her iMac, and it can do this because it controls everything that goes in that box.
I'm pretty sure you buy everything else from Apple, so an App isn't out of the question, right?
If you want an all in one small gaming box, go with a console and you can be sure that your neighbors don't have anything faster that you do. People that build high end machines don't give a damn about how it unfolds or how the mouse matches the monitor and keyboard; all they care about is how good the graphics look, how fast the game is, and how quickly can you change out a part when something faster comes out. To this end gamer boxes tend to be big, bulky, ugly, and sit on the floor out of sight anyway. If you want a pretty box, get a console, and stop spaming Apple products on us!
But this is all far to complicated! It's easier just to get an Apple Mac. The upgrades are far easier (just get your mom to do it) and you don't have to bother with all that technical stuff to enjoy Battlefield 1, Dark Souls 3, Doom, Far Cry Primal, Firewatch, Hitman, No Man's Sky, Overwatch, Pokemon Go (on Android), Quantum Break, Tom Clancy's The Division, Total War: Warhammer, Uncharted 4, The Witness and XCOM 2, and that's just the more popular ones from this year. No wait, only kidding, it's an Apple Mac, you get Pokemon Go and XCOM 2. I heard XCOM 2 is good though.
The dick in the above referenced article is a good example of a millennial geek.
A Complete pussy; like all the modern 'geeks' I see who, if something is hard, buy a prepackaged piece of shit to do most of it for them; like an Xbone or Playscool box with auto aim so they can hit something.
"Why write code, if I can download it off the internet?" - nameless intern, last fall.
People don't do things because they're hard to do anymore, because it's hard to do, lol.
Even the new DOOM game on PC is watered down with "hack modules" because otherwise combat is too hard.
All the new PC games are complete crap, ported over from the Xbone.
IMHO, The last Good PC FPS was Crysis Wars, and we can still run our own private servers, so no cheats. :)
Quake 2 & 3 runs on almost anything; We play those in the PMT lab on raspberry Pi's, and yes, I do use a keyboard. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
600 bucks will build you a high/mid end game machine that will run everything at medium just fine.
You spend more on your cellphones in a year.
Indulge yourself in an automotive hobby:
- Honda CRX, $1500
- Initial fixes, $1000-2000
- Improvements such as clutch, suspension, intake/fuel, $1200-2000
- Cosmetics, $200-$500
- Tires and wheels, $1000-3000
- Additional tools, $500-2000
Total, $5,400-$11,000.
Try this with a 2005 Impala SS, similar money. Jeep CJ, similar with a higher max. Classic US muscle car, double the top figure maybe. Mangle your existing daily driver, plan on being close to he bottom unless you've chosen something without many options, and you've just chosen the equivalent of a $500 gaming rig, never really that much fun. Cost of tires to learn to drive quick, priceless.
Or, maybe, woodworking:
Uplevel Table Saw, $250-750
Drill Press - $150-500
Planer - $250-1000
Band Saw - $125-500
Work Bench - $100-400
Oscillating Sander - $100-250
Router and table - $125-300
Dust Collection - $100-500
Total, $1,200-2,950. A lathe would be the next investment. Cost of lumber to learn proficiency, priceless.
Both requiring similar amounts of space dedicated to the hobby... More than gaming.
Maybe you'd prefer to take up elk or deer hunting?
- Big game rifle, $500-1800
- Scope, $150-700
- Ammo for practice, $250-450
- Ammo for hunting, $150-450
- Cold weather gear, $300-1000
- Travel expenses for a weekend hunt, $200-1500
- Assumes you already posses a vehicle. Cost of trips to learn proficiency, priceless. Actually killing an animal, superlative.
Total: $1350-4400
Bowhunting expenses would be similar.
Or maybe you would, as I do, prefer flyfishing?
- Trout rod, $75-$500
- Reel, $35-200
- Backing and floating line, $40-100
- Spare spool, Backing and sinking line, $65-150
- Basic fly collection, $45-200 (an ongoing expense)
- Waders, $45-250
- Vest or jacket, $25-200
- Tackle, boxes, accessories, $100-500
- Travel expenses for weekend trip, $200-1800
Total: $620-3700 (Can be cheap). Cost to learn proficiency, priceless. Actually catching a fish, immaterial A day fishing is a good day, catching a fish is a GREAT day.
Hunting and fishing also requires physical exertion and time from home.
You could get into metal working, but plan on adding a zero to the woodworking hobby to approach the same level. Welding requires not just space, but careful examination of your homeowner's insurance coverage...
I see decent gaming rigs built from $500-1500, and all-out rigs topping $2500. Seems like an affordable hobby, and the added benefit of having a functional PC for all those other uses. If there's a notebook game rig that doesn't burn the graphic chip and your thighs, you got yourself a hobby that can be indulged on a cross-country flight, maybe, if inflight WiFi latency doesn't make you dead. I'm jaded, of course, since everything is either a twitch game, tedious leveling and learning the story, or IGP.
Expensive? Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Okay, so building a system is hard and expensive?!? But what, buying an iMac is cheap?!? If you want a gaming rig and don't want to figure out part specs, buy an Alienware or Xidax box and game on. This isn't 1970, you don't have to build your own box. (Computers and gaming isn't just for hobbyists.) And if this proves too expensive for you, buy and eMachine and play your dad's copy of Star Craft. (Or you could get a real job and move out of the basement... but stop whining and move on)
"Another change I made to the PC Gamer build in the name of convenience is buy one, slightly slower 1TB solid state drive instead of one smaller but faster solid state drive and another smaller, cheaper one."
If it's in the name of convenience, then why not a 1TB SSD?
"There were some things about my build that were different from the guide, like my CPU Corsair Hydro Series H100i water cooling system, which, unlike a standard heatsink, doesn't require applying thermal paste."
Hmm (yes I know, pre-applied but still)
"It would be nice if the instructions for my MasterCase Maker 5 PC case, which unfold to a single, four-foot long sheet of paper, made it clear that I had to run a SATA cable behind the motherboard to a separate card so the fans could get power"
eh, hard to argue with that, it's always good to find a review of your case to find out all the little things
"but there's no easy-to-find "quick setup guide." Instead, there's an inscrutable 160-page manual that didn't help me find out where to plug in anything."
I see reading is also hard for this poor soul (something to do with that apple logo?)
"Apple reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the RAM on her iMac"
Heh, not anymore
"When I'm pushing a water cooler down on the CPU while twisting its radiator into place and screwing it into place at the same time"
That's a new way to do it, I suppose
"People who build their own PCs aren't like garage woodworkers building their own birdhouses. They're not making anything in the same way that someone might restore an old hotrod. They're just taking different parts from different companies and plugging them together."
Spoken like a man without tools (though the apple should make that apparent)
Funnily enough, my Linux box is a decent enough gaming box -- not PC Master Race level, but I'm able to play all the steam games I've tried on it. Most of my library focuses on gameplay over graphics, so I haven't really pushed it very hard. It's still a nicer situation than the last time I tried, when the only commercial games you could get for Linux came from Loki games. That being said, I still miss Tribes 2.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seriously track pads and gaming do not belong in the same article unless you've got your own YouTube channel to make money off of your masochism, or you only play Draw Something.
Welcome to the generation where the only criteria for anything is "can I get what I want without having to make even a tiny one-time effort"
I have built machines in the past and replaced parts in current ones and while I agree that building your own, looking up parts and trying figure out what works and doesn't work can be fun, if your into building hot rods. The parts are all available and there are places that tell you what you can use, you still have to do a lot of research. I think the main point of the article was that the way these parts are all assembled has not progressed much, since the old days (even apple II+ era) of how things go together. There are way too many cables, small connectors, screws and trying to fit things into boxes is a bit of a pain, even replacing hard drives you have to move stuff around and trying to get access to the plugs is even worse when they are all buried and hard to get to. Dell does a great job of compacting them, but they are not always accessible. Yes it would be nicer if there were some easier plug and play ways and common cables that work for all, how many times have we all tried to put in a USB stick and figure out if it's the wrong way up, even when we know its the right way and it still doesn't go in. When Steve Jobs built the Next machine, his goal was to make it simple with only 1 or 2 cables and you can see that in the macs now, but PC's have never been able to reduce the number of parts or cables or small screws. I think it's time to make them more simple it would only help the PC sales and get more people interested in learning more about them and building them.
First, have fun with that Apple gaming rig. Second, how hard is it to make that extra 4 grand, to buy that Apple, instead of spending 1 grand and putting some screws in.
welp vice, you were a decent source for a while, but now that gawker is sued to oblivion, i guess someone had to take the reigns. oh and like the others alluded to: congrats on the new apple products/endorsement.
Why? No I mean really why? The author is clearly not one for carefully picking parts so he's not serious about cutting edge or anything like that. He should just walk into a computer store say "I want a gaming rig" drop $1000 and walk out.
This is no different from any other hobby. You can make it as easy or as complicated as you want on many levels. It's only when you start getting into the pro side of things that tiny crap like the smoothness of the mouse, or the customizability of the keys on the keyboard, or those extra 10fps you get when spending $100 more on the highest of end hardware make any difference at all.
The author has no business building a computer, and no business having any hobby at all. I mean I asked a friend of mine for advice about buying a fishing rod last time we went camping. Finding the parts and building the highest end of computers is much simpler than understanding the subtle differences between the many different reels of fishing rods. Incidentally I walked into a BCF, told the man I want a fishing rod for under $100 and walked out with a fishing rod for under $100 I was happy with too, much to my friend's objections.
Exactly this. I bought a simple $800 Dell XPS for coding away from home (extended contract living in a hotel) but started missing gaming after a while. I bought a 980 and stuck it in, and it plays AAA titles at max settings no problem.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Seriously? No Seriously? I'm not a 'gamer' but I've built more than one PC in my day 'from scratch', this story is no more relevant today than it was in the 1980's. If you want something pre-built that 'just works' its easy to find gaming PCs as well. If you want/like to have more control than that can be done too along with needing to actually 'learn something' in doing it right. The latter has value in & of itself.
What is this a slow news day? No shootings to report on today?
Logical Increments is also great. They split everything out into builds that are graded on price/performance with a selection of parts under each category that have been tested to work together.
...there are these places that will BUILD ONE FOR YOU! I know, boggles the mind, right?
Consoles are way cheaper and easier to use! I can't use a keyboard and mouse, I've tried. I always feel more at home with a controller.
My fingers ARE sausages, you insensitive clod!
Thank you! That one made me laugh out loud :)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
OK, 300lb Homer. To obtain a special key-pressing wand, mash your palm against the keyboard.
Building your own PC is like tinkering with cars back in the 60's: If you know what you're doing, or are willing to learn, you can trade your time for money and it isn't all that expensive. Eventually it won't take much of your time either. Replacing a Video card when yours goes obsolete will run you no more than $200 for a passable one, and replacing your CPU/Motherboard/RAM when the CPU goes obsolete (sadly, I almost always have to do all 3 at once) will be about $300. Anything else you just replace when it breaks, and it won't be more than $100 unless you really wanna geek out on it.
But the most important difference they don't mention is backward-compatibility. I've been doing this since the OS2-Warp days, and can still play nearly my entire games library if I feel like it. Certainly every game I bought in the last 10 years (excepting MMO's that no longer have servers) I can still install and play on my PC.
Compare this with the "gaming console". That's the same $300-500 ($250 if you are cheap and don't mind waiting a year or so) when your old one goes obsolete, but you have to throw out your entire game library as well. Software is king in this world, so that's a defining difference in my book.
devoid of insight, overflowing with a lack of understanding
People have been successfully buying and assembling gaming PCs from selected parts for MANY years now, and the process has only gotten easier with time; not harder.
I remember in the early 1990's taking a job with a "mom and pop" computer reseller. We were occasionally asked to build someone a good "gaming PC" or "file server" or other such requests. Back then, you still had the old AT style power supplies in use, not ATX or ITX. With AT style, you were responsible for connecting the 4 colored power wires to the back of the ON/OFF switch yourself. Mix them up and you created a dead short that tended to blow up the whole thing the moment you powered it on.
Now, power ON/OFF is handled by the motherboard itself, so you only have to connect a power switch jumper to a couple of pins on the motherboard (and polarity doesn't even matter).
And CPUs are easier to install without damaging them too! On the old ones from the i386 and i486 days, you had relatively long pins under them which easily got bent. Whenever that happened, you were stuck trying to use a tweezers or very small screwdriver to pry the bent pin back up. Half the time, it would wind up snapping off instead, trashing the CPU.
Don't forget that today's motherboards have all of the peripheral ports integrated on them! In the "bad old days", you had to install a card for your hard drive controller and serial/parallel ports, a card to handle your sound, and cards for your USB or firewire ports if you wanted those. Often, at least one of those boards would have some kind of incompatibility with the rest of your hardware so you had to troubleshoot all of that and possibly try other makes/brands of cards to get it all playing well together. Re-configuring said cards usually involved placing jumpers on the correct rows of pins on the cards, too. No easy software setup!
There are several reasons people buy Apple computers vs. building a PC - but gaming is very rarely one of them! I use Macs at home and have for the last 10 years or so. But I still put together my own Windows 10 gaming PC for games like Fallout 4 I wanted to play on it. As I get older though, I generally prefer the "unbox it and go" experience I get with a pre-built machine, and I like a lot of things about the Apple experience when I'm going to go that route anyway. (OS X is still my preferred operating system, and I appreciate having local stores all over the country where I can schedule appointments to have my machine serviced, rather than always having to mail it out someplace after calling some toll-free support number and wasting an hour or more on the phone.)
The words are English but the sentence isn't even on the same tectonic plate. Note that, again, the original article was better - "[...] this is something you're going to have to keep investing time and money in as long as you want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new PC games."
Though it does go on to say nerve-wrecking. That's not in the context of myelin deterioration or anything like that, before some aspie chimes in with a hypothetical corner-case that might be relevant once in the entire life of the solar system.
At the bottom of the
What a jack ass.
you don't deserve to compute
That's awesome. First the author postulates you need an unreasonable amount of disposable income, and yet his solution to that is to buy something from...Apple???
As for that headline--guess what, putting together a hot-rod is also still way too hard. If you want something prebuilt, get something from Alienware.
this is why PC gamers are better then console gamers. at least its a barrier to entry that you can solve a fairly complicated technical problem to get in and stay in. games are more intelligent that way.
do you want even more 65 year old alchy moms on WoW???
Seriously some people are sooo pathetic. Building a PC is braindead easy. Even the cables have connectors designed so they only fit in the right places so you literally can't screw it up.
Because nobody can buy a basic gaming box for about $800.
Nope. Just never happens.
Buy? I just recycle 3 year old retired business desktops from customers. Slap in a 850W PSU, a graphics card, some more memory and an SSD. Not the cutting edge of gaming, but it is cheap.
Grab them directly from Nvidia.
In many cases you cannot, which is when laptopvideo2go.com comes in handy...
> keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge
Yeah thats awful, its definitely only a PC gaming problem, NOT. It happens with every man-made thing in the world. The entire car industry is fundamentally based on it.
The author makes this statement: " This is why people buy from Apple. It designs everything from the trackpad to the box the computer comes in, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need. Apple reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the RAM on her iMac, and it can do this because it controls everything that goes in that box."
The problem with this statement are many:
1. Only the small iMac today allows the RAM to be upgraded. The larger iMac has a glued in screen and nothing is accessible anymore without cutting it loose
2. Apple constantly changes the rules on what a user can upgrade - so if you want to avoid some OS headache in the future (remember TRIM support) - you have to spend a fortune on Apple branded parts
3. Doesn't Dell, HP, and other manufacturers do the same? Many also have gaming PCs.
4. How do you game on a Mac? Steam, some things yes. But otherwise bootcamp - not the same as an equivalent windows machine
5. And where is the power video card you wanted? Show me any Mac that lets you order that or upgrade an existing Video Card.
The entire article is dumb. It is no different then someone talking about building an Electric car. You can do it, it is not for everyone, or you can buy one from Kia, Nissan, Tesla, and others.
If you have sausage fingers and little mechanical aptitude, then don't embark on a project like this. It is like saying building a wooden table is still way to hard. It is if you don't know what you are doing, and so you can buy a table from 10 different stores. Same with a gaming rig.
"I have big, dumb, sausage fingers, so mounting the motherboard into the case, and screwing in nine (!) tiny screws to keep it in place in a cramped space, in weird angles, where dropping the screwdriver can easily break something expensive -- it's just not what I'd call "consumer-friendly."
Then you get PROPER TOOLS WITH EXTENDED SHAFTS instead of using tiny ones not designed for your fucking fat hands. Also, your fault for not picking a PC case with a slide-out motherboard tray, many are cheap as shit, and even have decent cable management.
"This is why people buy from Apple. It designs everything from the trackpad to the box the computer comes in, which unfolds neatly to reveal everything you need."
Excepting a proper top-class GPU for supposed top-class hardware.
"Apple reduces friction to the point where even my mom could upgrade the RAM on her iMac, and it can do this because it controls everything that goes in that box."
Most laptops and AIO PCs have been able to do that years before Apple ever did it, one door on the back side of the system. Most of those, much like most of Apple's offerings, are not meant for PC Gaming.
" they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income"
$800 got my fiance a very-near top of the line AMD system - FX-9370, 16GB DDR4, 8GB R9 390, case + 650w PSU. He already has 7TB worth of hard drives so no need to purchase more, and has a keyboard, mouse, and three 1680x1050 monitors already so no need to purchase those, ditto for his sound system. The system runs everything maxed out without an issue, excepting poorly-optimized Early Access games.
What does $800 get you in Apple hardware?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Adolescent me is shedding a silent, single tear in memory of how awesome Tribes 2 is... Now he's heading to the basement to see if those discs are still hiding in a random box somewhere.
You can buy a PC that runs games. The simplest way used to be buying a pre-built and slap in a new power supply and graphics card. Now you have the Windows 10 problem. Do you want to buy a pre-built with Windows 10 even on it? Iif you do, it is either you-accepted-full-spyware or an extreme hassle.
Your best bet isn't really a best bet until games are all ported and written for Linux. Until then console and minor pc gaming maybe? You can also learn to block all Windows 10 connections and do the hassle, or use an older version... doing the same thing. Block all the spyware connections. Then image it. Then reject updates because they want to put it back on, thanks to US Gov. Once you have your gaming OS, install Linux either on another partition or on an external drive. Boot into your spyware Windows (hopefully you hardened it enough) for your PC games and use Linux for surfing.
Literally your profile of name, face, voice, birthday, address, surfing habits, porn likes, Skype videos, family, contacts, passwords, phone number, screen resolution, screen colors, fonts installed, and way more are all there just from your Windows install. When you use Facebook you add where you were, who you know, when you were there, where you will go, what you own, when you were sick, when the dog farted, etc and how you feel about the news propaganda article by article you comment or like. On your phone your GPS and all that too. In a mall, what you bought and when and how much it was too. Malls use facial recognition on their cams too. Outdoors you have stop light cameras, police car license plate readers, repo man spotter license plate readers, planes/choppers/drones in the sky, etc. All. Cross. Referenced. Easily.
And more. So talk about these games. Forget your money is ripped off to beyond ever imaginable. Forget they spent it on all of the above.
So building a fat ass game rig is still easily done, or buying one, or paying somebody to build one for you. Or just do the basics to get your frame rates.
PEBKAC that I have ever witnessed inside my entire 30 year existence in the computing world. On top of it, they are backhandedly trying to imply that everyone should waste money on those shit-tier consoles shoveled out by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo that are years out of date when you pick them up from the shelf. Just no.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Didn't this site used to be news for nerds? Sausage fingers is clearly not that...
Found the problem. It lies at the intersection of "...to build a gaming PC.." and "...even my Mom..."
Your Mom (sorry to use the stereotype, but the author raised it) isn't going to build a PC. Or upgrade RAM. Or install her OS. None of that is going to happen.
The fictional Mom is going to buy a fully equipped computer and never open it. And this is the market that Apple caters to, BTW. To compare the home-built PC market to Apple's value proposition is wrong. So wrong. It's like comparing a Formula 1 racecar to a Honda Civic (or even a Mercedes) and complaining "this F1 is so technical and is turning off the fumble-fingered masses!"
Set up a Straw Man argument and arrive at an inevitable conclusion, then congratulate yourself on your outstanding work. Truly lame.
pfft, i'd say it's easier than ever now, especially with all those so called "pc master race" children out there living off their parent's holiday purchases. They don't have to suffer the SCSI/IDE/ISA/cache era of pain.
How the fuck am I supposed to click that? I have big, dumb, sausage fingers!
Get you mum to do it after she has finished soldering on the new memory chips which is what is required to upgrade an iMac's memory unless it is old or top of the line.
Just get a recent US$400-$500 prefab system. Congratulations, you now have a perfectly fine gaming machine that can play most modern games with at least the visual quality of the current generation of consoles (which run at whatever the lowest settings the game allows for.) The only thing you really need to look for is to make sure it has AMD or NVIDIA graphics, and not Intel. So you might lose out of a new bleeding-edge titles, big deal, it still proves this rubbish article to be written by myopic idiots.
Most games on Steam still run fine on XP and old Intel laptop integrated cards. If you want game of the year at 4k resolution and 120Hz, that's entirely your choice. There are hundreds of great titles with reasonable system requirements, Many are not available on consoles, or at least the particular console you have at home. "The town of light" is the latest PC-only game I played that rocks.
No troll. Gaming in a VM is fine, depending upon the game. If it's a AAA recent game, then no.
for the record, i play witcher3 in ultra in a vm. :)
the catch is of course that i have a dedicated graphics card passed through for the purpose
sake
Mostly because you have no idea what you're getting into until it's maybe too late. Let's say you buy parts. AMD cards have major performance and stability issues that the hard core don't notice because they're only playing the latest and greatest. Somebody new to PC gaming that starts buying stuff off Steam sales is in for some unpleasant surprises. You can buy Intel, but then you've got other problems. If you didn't shell out at lease $600 (probably $800) you got integrated graphics and a 250 watt power supply that can't drive a decent card. You also got a dual core i3, only to find most modern games need a quad core (probably not for any good reason, but there you go). You could replace that power supply, but you better hope Dell didn't swap the hot and ground so you'd be force to buy from them. The glory days of buying a $400 dell & putting a $150 card in it and running Quake 3 at 60fps 1024x768x32 max detail are gone.
No, PC gaming is still a mine field littered with bodies. Yes, once your foot is in the door it's not so bad. A 3 year old build with a decent power supply is fine. But I think TFA's point was that it's still messy as hell to get in the door vs buying a playstation and plugging it in.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Mine don't fizzle out if I forget to ground myself before installing them. I also don't have to worry about putting the right amount, type and pattern of thermal paste on them before lacing them up the first time and lacing them up too tight doesn't snap the traces in my shoes (they don't have traces)...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
that don't need to own a PC. If you're an auto mechanic a shop tablet is enough. Maybe a chromebook if you want a real keyboard. And go troubleshoot a busted AMD video driver and tell me about the using a computer...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
those $600 Dells are usually $800. Yeah, I know kotaku has a code pretty much every week, but how many folks just getting started on PC Gaming read Kotaku? Plus I can get an xboxone refurb for $179 or spluge and pay $250 new. If I want to go all out I can spend $300 on a PS4. Buy a cheap $200 laptop for web browsing (or go chromebook and get it for $150) and I'm _still_ ahead. That Dell isn't very upgradable. It's usually got a 300 watt power supply, you're not even gonna get an R480 in there, and 50/50 the power supply is proprietary.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
in the last 3 years. AMD is the only competitor Intel/nVidia have (respectively) and both companies know it. There's been a small drop (maybe $100) but not a big drop off. nVidia gimps their video cards with a 128-bit bus. The thing that keeps the cost of Intel based systems up is the need to get an i5 for 4 cores, which is fast becoming a requirement (even if most games are really just using 1 core and lazily binding to core 3, I'm looking at you, Farcry 4).
AMD Zen + Directx12 might even things up. If AMD has competitive CPUs that'll help, and DX12 might make some of the shenanigans that nVidia pulls to make AMD cards unstable go away. But It'll be a year at least before we see that. In the meantime an entry level rig that can reliable game at 1080p/30+fps is gonna set you back $600-$800 unless you're really hunting for your components or pirating your copy of Windows.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You can pickup last years workstations on eBay rather cheaply.
Either office businesses are failing, or updating too often.
If you use a type 1 hypervisor like Hyper-V for the pro versions of Windows it will use hardware directly unlike the crappy VMware Workstation and virtualbox
http://saveie6.com/
No, they're not. They don't cite any sources, nor do they benchmark anything themselves. It's all just pulled out of their ass, with no data backing it up.
Sites like Tom's Hardware and AnandTech actually buy and benchmark the cards they recommend.
Yes, but you can *only* replace the RAM in an iMac. If you want to replace the SSD/hard disk or CPU, as a true "gamer" might want to do, then you're going to have all sorts of fun pulling it apart (a specialist pizza cutter to remove the adhesive behind that pretty glass screen, specialist screw drivers to un/refasten everything inside, depending on the model a specialist temperature sensor/SATA dongle to stick on the new SSD/hard disk, and new adhesive strips to stick everything together). And you'll never be able to upgrade the "video card" it's integrated into the motherboard!
Now try to game with your shiny new and upgraded iMac, whose warranty you've just invalidated... most games on Steam are Windows-only, especially AAA games, and of those that are "OSX compatible" many don't perform well on high resolution Retina displays.
Just buy an Alienware gaming machine if you're too delicate to build one from scratch.
Lol, why the fuck would you go to all that trouble for a gaming box ?
I guess you can do it, I just don't get why you would.
Love it or hate it, but the intel integrated chips are now actually able to boot and run a lot if not all available games for the PC at let's say "console level" frame rate.
So casual people can pretty much use their newest dell to play most stuff they get on steam.
So I did that on my own when I was like 10 but without the internet and you had to figure out the right combinations of supported IRQs (one particular problem IIRC being my ISDN card and the soundcard), jumper the hard drives and CD drives correctly, couldn't load Highmem And the soundcard driver And the cd driver driver at the same time and loads of other problems. Kids these days. Pfft. Now get off my lawn...
Hehe...I love my PC. The vegetables can keep their consoles; PC Parts Picker has made it almost idiot proof. It's no harder than assembling Lego at this point.
Building PCs now is easier than it ever has been. When I started building PCs for my first job at 16, I came home with shredded fingers, and nicked knuckles from 15-20 razor sharp PC cases I built every day. The cases today are better by far than they ever were. Sure it's complicated and expensive, but it's really turned into a hobbyists passion now. This post is like telling an RC car enthusiast their hobby takes too long to build the car, or a golfer it's too hard to figure out which clubs you want to buy. Posting this makes you look silly.
Meanwhile, that $200 console is going to need a $500-$1000(or more) big-screen TV
PCs and consoles use the same monitor nowadays: HDMI, which is DVI with digital audio stuffed in the blanking periods. Xbox 360 was the first major console to switch to HDMI, followed by PlayStation 3 a year later and Wii U a generation later. Get an HDMI switch and plug your PC and console into it.
if you want some l33t controllers that give you an edge in the game, that's gonna set you back at least $100 more - per controller.
Why more than one? Do they wear out easily? Besides, you might still need a l33t mouse and l33t keyboard.
Of course, bad-assed headphone/mic set is de rigueûr, and that's gonna set you back from $35 to $100 extra or more
Likewise for PC.
Xbox and PS controllers are way too hard, the mouse and keyboard are the reasons why PC gaming remains
You can build a "budget" gaming rig these days for $550, which will play most games except the very latest at high/ultra quality settings.
And shops like NCIX will send one already built and tested to your door and save you the headache of picking it out yourself.
So for the price of a console you get a rig with the potential to upgrade a couple of parts before you get around to replacing it.
Do current games get released for Mac these days?
Sometimes you'll see a port to macOS as a side effect of a port to SteamOS or iOS, as both macOS and X11/Linux (of which SteamOS is a distribution) can use OpenGL, and iOS shares a lot of API plumbing with macOS. And if a game is made with Unreal Engine or Unity, it's just a matter of checking macOS in the build options.
... if there were any PC manufacturers out there which offered pre-built gaming PC systems you did not have to put together yourself.
Instructions unclear, used my penis, now Russian hackers have superglued my balls to the phone and are demanding 1 Bitcoin for the solvent. Please halp
This guy doesn't have teh YouTubes? All you have to do is type in "$XXX gaming PC" with XXX being your budget and you'll find a video complete with benches and parts links. Here is a $400 build that does 1080P with vid and links to the parts are in the description.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well I guess some folks here hate Windows soich that they fell running in played wine or a vm is superior to running if on Windows itself
http://saveie6.com/
Or this.
Graphics drivers for laptops are highly custom and infrequently updated so you'll always be 6 months behind the bleeding edge of fixes.
False. I use laptops exclusively and the drivers for my GPUs are released lockstep with Nvidia's desktop GPUs. Laptop GPU drivers are just as generic as their desktop relatives.
All games play fine in a VM if you have it set up right. You need a VT-d CPU, two discrete GPUs and a VM that can handle PCI passthrough. You can achieve 95%+ native speed.
BS. Hyper-V must go through RemoteFX in order to use your GPU and then it only supports DirectX acceleration at a significant performance hit. Set up correctly, VirtualBox and VMware can both outperform Hyper-V handily, while maintaining compatibility with all graphics APIs.
When was the last time you used a laptop? Ten years ago?
Nvidia has provided laptop drivers for years and laptopvideo2go hasn't been relevant for a long time.
ISDN? CD drive? SOUND CARD?
I loaded my games off of cassette tapes and 5.25" floppies on a VIC-20 or IBM XT clone with CGA, PC speaker and 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. Now get off of MY lawn, kid.
Well to be fair you're using a computer where the bit depth selection screen says, "Thousands of Colors, or Millions of Colors" I am surprised they don't spell color with a 'u' just to be a little more apple shitbag pretentious, and then you would assume that graphics is their strong point or even more than an afterthought to them. When on a normal PC you can easily adjust memory times and GPU clock rates in the stock drivers. But hey it has an apple on the side that means good right?
It's even easier, I got my PC at dell and it plays games like Fallout 4 just fine. The "too hard" is for people who want the best PC which already has higher performance than any console would ever see anyway. If you only needed to match console performance then the PC is much more affordable. The difference between the PC you have for web browsing and taxes and whatnot and a mid range PC for games is less than the cost of a console.
Plus, you don't need to build your l33t rig just because you intend to do some gaming. If you don't want to build it yourself there are plenty of companies who will shove a tested combination of off the shelf components into a box for you, for a pretty modest premium over doing it yourself; and even a random Dell or the like probably just needs a better graphics card to be more than adequate for most games, since CPUs are mostly absurdly powerful.
Sure, the agony of trying to figure out why $1500 worth of parts won't POST after accidentally slicing your hand open on case sheet metal and without sufficient test equipment or spare components sucks; but that's largely irrelevant because it's totally optional.
They do but it's not always right. I trusted it once in the past and they shipped a motherboard with processor bundle where you had to flash the bios to run the processor. Which means you had to have an older processor to get the system running with the bundle they created. Their response? We don't guarantee compatability on our bundles and that is up to the consumer.
> Instead, there's an inscrutable 160-page manual that didn't help me find out where to plug in anything.
That's funny. When I take a 10 second glance through this inpenetrably dense tome of inscrutability I see Chapter 2 is devoted to "plugging in" everything from the motherboard into a case to the front I/O connector and expansion card. Just like every other motherboard manual in the entire world. Where it diverts from many other motherboard manuals is the very large images in rather significant amounts of detail showing where and how to plug in things, including the correct orientation of the connectors.
Seriously, this fag isn't even a console peasant. An iPad, that's what he wants. Even an Android tablet would be too technical for him.
Jesus Christ is this what Generation Y has degenerated into where putting 9 screws into something is some major problem? You lot are absolutely fucked if that is the case. Still it means that my wages will go up as you all run away from anything which presents even the slightest challenge.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
PCs also benefit from the fact that 'pay a subscription fee for multiplayer' never caught on; and unless you insist on pre-order or day 1 purchasing everything(in which case the prices are usually the same), PC game prices seem to fall faster than console game prices do.
Cassette tapes? Floppies?
I played my games with sticks, cans and chalk, on the road.
Bullshit and fuck off.
Your laptop vendor can't release their custom spin until it's released to them and, if you're lucky, they test it.
Or post your laptop model to prove it.
PCMR doesn't mean high end. The PCMR subreddit's wiki lists a few recommended entry-level and midrange gaming PC builds. "The Crusher" beats the Athlon 5150-equivalent in the PS4.
You had sticks, cans, chalk, and concrete/asphalt?
Sticks? Cans?
I didn't play any games because games hadn't been invented yet.
First, watch your fucking mouth, boy. You haven't got a clue what you are talking about.
Your laptop vendor can't release their custom spin until it's released to them and, if you're lucky, they test it.
What custom spin? A laptop MXM is as generic as a desktop graphics card. They all use the same drivers and I haven't had a problem using drivers direct from Nvidia on a laptop in a long time. The last time I needed to use custom infs and shit was on a Dell Latitude C810 with a GeForce 2 Go circa 2001.
Or post your laptop model to prove it.
My current laptop is a 2014 Alienware 17 with a GeForce GTX 770M. My previous laptop is an ASUS G73SW with a GeForce GTX 460M. The laptop before that is an Acer Aspire 8930 with a GeForce 9600M GT. ALL of them use and have always used Nvidia reference drivers with no issue.
Maybe you should try a laptop newer than a decade old, you ignorant little shit.
These days, the base computer will last at least 5 years. Only the GPU will probably be upgraded in that time.
Buy a ~$200 GPU from either Nvidia or AMD. Buy AAA games that have been discounted to $5. Occasionally, you may buy a newer high-end game and run it at somewhat reduced settings. (I've got a first-gen i3 paired with a 750 Ti. It runs Thief 2014 with Normal textures and most other settings on high.)
Most of the other stuff such as overclocking or triple SLI aren't needed.
Right now, prices to build a new computer are pretty good. I could build a 16 gig, 2 TB, i3 system (sans GPU, but including Windows) for $400. Or a base-model i7 for $600. Both are cheaper than Dell or other offerings.
PC gaming is too hard, but the article completely missed why. Hardware is a solved problem, as many have attested to. But having to circumvent different DRM schemes, install competing stores just to install games, screw around with graphics drivers, tweak game settings, handle weekly OS updates and upgrades, change your username to not have a space in it, and so on... That's the real problem. On my phone or console I install and it runs. Anything I want to do extra is optional. That's how it should be.
Or just select your games appropriately. I have no problem with my hardware, a VT-55, running my game of choice, Nethack. Only problem is the EPROM character generator (a 1702) is now more than thirty years over its design life, and some of the pixels flicker on and off due to read disturbs.
Dude I typed in XXX gaming and got something entirely different ;)
I'm sorry, I'd like to know how this nonsense got posted to Slashdot? This clown has seriously published an article claiming that, and this is a verbatim quote from the article: "That's why I recommend Apple products to people who aren't tech savvy. They just work. When I'm pushing a water cooler down on the CPU while twisting its radiator into place and screwing it into place at the same time, it becomes clear that PCs don't just work."
Some complete clown is comparing a build it yourself bunch of components to a pre-built machine, in the some breath as talking about high end gaming (something you cannot even do on a Mac)? That's like (to use a Slashdot car analogy) complaining that if you buy all the pieces to make your own car, it's harder than buying a Hyundai. No shit, idiot. What a total surprise to see a tech journalist doesn't even have a basic understanding of the topic they're writing about.
So basically we have some guy who doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't understand the topic of his own article - and yet it's published on Slashdot? Why?
"This is why people buy from Apple."
This is why I don't buy from Apple you fat fingered knuckle dragger:
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
VS
https://amzn.com/B00XUDLXJG
https://amzn.com/B00MMLXIHM
https://amzn.com/B00OTJZTBS
2x https://amzn.com/B01CZ1HKCW
https://amzn.com/B01639694M
https://amzn.com/B008Q7HUR0
https://amzn.com/B010NS1LVA
Subtotal: $4,080.90
Not much of a fan of AMD but these specs blow the most expensive Mac Pro out of the water for around the same price.
Fucking overpriced garbage...
Counter argument: Why would you go to the trouble of gaming on a PC when you can just use a Playstation?
We all have different thresholds, and I'm weird. My machine is also used for heavy software development, emulation and simulation along with some server duties. Gaming uses a tiny fraction of one CPU (but all of the 1080 GTX). I'm definitely more about the machine than the game.
Do I recommend this for anyone else? No. The machine can be a nightmare. Every PC has its own unique quirks. This one can't even boot Win10 on bare metal because of UEFI BIOS weirdness in dual GPU. *shrug*
This isn't a niche experience though, one of my old laptops couldn't play Lego Star Wars because reasons. My current gaming laptop can't play Skyrim because the Lenovo crapware keeps stealing focus and locking up the game.
They're all special snowflakes.
Why isn't everything easy! :'(
You can buy an off-the-shelf gaming PC comparable to any Apple computer, and usually for quite a bit less.
PC gaming is only "hard" if you really want absolutely top of the line gear that even Alienware doesn't bother trying to sell. But that's also way above the spec of any Mac you can buy so the comparison is pretty damned fallacious.
Of course you still have to have an idea of what you're purchasing since you have you know.. options.. in the PC world and not all of them provide the same value for your money. So I guess Apple is "easier" in the sense that the only thing you need to know is how far to bend over.
If your CPU is too slow it may end up crappy at playing the games.
What the fuck is this article doing on the front page?
You can download the generic drivers for a mobile Quadro, but you'll have to lie to Nvidia's website and say your video card was bought by you (instead of furnished by the manufacturer). I'm not sure whether you can do that if your laptop has integrated graphics (my Dell Precision m4800 has a discrete Quadro m2100 video card... from what I've read, other cards are probably electronically compatible, but it's anybody's guess whether other cards will physically fit and have screw holes in the right place. I believe Dell & Alienware laptops use the same dimensions for their discrete laptop video cards, though.
Most people know someone that will help them build a new rig for a case of beer anyways. And this guy's article was obviously clickbait at its finest with the amount of hyperbole and sensationalism being thrown about. Not to mention spending way more money than needed for a decent gaming PC.
Who buys a 1TB SSD for a standard gaming system? Nobody. He also spent $180 on a case and $200 on a mobo when there are plenty of very nice cases in the $100 range and mobos in the $120-150 range. And with a case as large as the one he bought, I don't buy that he couldn't fit the motherboard in there easily and screw it down. Those tend to have plenty of access space, with the only somewhat troublesome screw being the one in the back corner by the PSU, but thats what a magnetized screwdriver is for then. Consumer watercooling solutions are also really simple to tie down. Far easier than a standard cooler, since it requires far less pressure.
Guy sounds like a wanker judging by his Twitter account anyways, so not surprised.
http://www.alienware.com/
Not for you ?
TBH, you need to be a 13-year-old teenage boy to be able to appreciate the Alienware aesthetic.
Similar: My 3770K is over 4 years old now and all I've done is update the video card once. Still plays new games like a champ.
-Is PC gaming hard? No. It's as easy as gaming with any console. Steam and Origin and places like GoG with their certified launchers have made playing on PC just as easy.
-Is it expensive? No. You can get more bang for your buck than with any current generation consoles. Google with the phrase "how much would it cost to build a pc with xbox one specs" and you'll get plenty of articles describing how to do it. The difference being that you might need to get a monitor - With consoles you already have it: TV. But the latency of TVs is not an issue with most genres of games, so you can hook it up to your TV as well.
-Is the process of hunting parts hard? No. This comment chain already has several sites, plus basically any open forum with PC gamers has a handful of helpful souls that can assist in selecting a suitable rig for you. And prebuilt packaged PC is what I've been playing with for years now, because I'm lazy(but I dislike the decision and need some upgrades once I get some money together).
-Why do it over consoles? No fucking reason. Unless you intend to get into MMOs or FPS games, which are simply better controlled with keyboard and mouse, or you intend to do some work on it as well. E-sports outside of fighting games is pretty exclusive to PC as well. Other than that, if all your friends play on consoles or you're happy with the selection of games you get on consoles, stay with consoles. Or be like some of us and have both a pc and the consoles.
This article is just cringy flamebait from a person that despite claiming to know "a bit about PCs", knows about as much as Jon Snow: Nothing.
This guy is a total pussy.
Building PCs is not something you do once; you do it at least often enough that none of the shit that surprised him matters AT ALL. I barely paid attention to the last system I built ~6 months ago, in part because all I needed to know was which RAM banks were preferred and the board header pinout. But they supplied a marked module for that. Flawless assembly.
I have no idea how many PCs I have assembled. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. What the fuck ever, even if I didn't know, there are tons of how-tos on Youtube because every dork seems to love doing an assembly video. OMG maybe the board will be a different color this time. Otherwise they are mostly the same.
Anyway this schmuck has NO CLUE how it used to be when IDE drives from different brands would not cooperate, and hell you had to have an ISA serial/parallel/drive controller/game port card AND know how to deal with interrupts and IRQs and Sound Blaster INITs. All this guy has to fucking do is put in some screws and plug in some drives and Windows fucking 10 will do all the rest.
But he broke a sweat (!) so here's a goddamn article on how HAAARD it was.
If you want to game you will find a way. My balls must be bigger. I spent the day figuring out how to download and install and sign up for a PC MMO that's only in Chinese. There is no English patch. There is scant English info on it at all. I don't speak Chinese. I can't fucking read it. But I still got the damn game installed and running beautifully AND helped a friend get it setup on their PC 700 miles away via Skype. So I am remotely helping someone else in a language neither of us understands, to play a game we want to play so badly, we will fucking play it in Chinese.
If you want to play a game badly enough, you will find a way. That's a gamer.
If all you want to do is bitch about fat fingers and how HARD it is to use a damn screwdriver, well, we know he's somebody's little bitch. Give him an etch a sketch or one of those old Mattel LED football games. Wait, those were hard to play. A coloring book and crayons. He can't cope with more difficulty.
Sig for hire.
Really. What's so difficult about it anyway? The hardest part is installing that antiquated OS they call Windows.
It isn't necessarily zero sum, since what they will own is a Mac laptop. While you can play some basic games on that, you'd need a second system to do any real gaming.
The logical argument of "Well just get a PC and use it for games and writing," is lost on them. I mean how could you NOT have a trendy Mac laptop? It is just unthinkable!
4GB RAM and Intel IRIS graphics? Yeah, you're a real ass-kicker there.
Make it cheaper than the current (working well enough, mind you) solution.
Are you so very scared?
The comment before said
(I know lots of people) that don't need to own a PC.
And gave several valid examples.
You then said
If you think not knowing how to US a PC is acceptable in the 21st century
Which is completely and utterly non-sequitur in relation to the comment. The comment indeed even mentioned people who would know how to use (I'll presume that is what you meant when you said "US a PC") a PC, but don't need to own it.
Has it occurred to you how many people have jobs where they use something that they don't have at home? In fact that describes most skilled labor, and a lot of unskilled as well. Short of live-in B&B keepers and people who make all their income driving for Uber, that actually describes the majority of all workers. PC skills are important, but not everyone needs to own one if they don't want to.
Your claim of
your ignorance as to how to deal with that
Does not connect in any way to the previous comment and shows that you did a shit-poor job of reading the comment you replied to.
this gem tells pretty much everything about the author: "change I made to the PC Gamer build in the name of convenience is buy one, slightly slower 1TB solid state drive instead of one smaller but faster solid state drive and another smaller, cheaper one. I just didn't want to manage storage across multiple drives."
Okay, maybe not everyone has as much fun as I do building computers, and high-end components are wicked expensive, but you (okay, I) rarely start entirely from scratch. Cases, drives, monitors, peripherals, and PSU's need replacement far less often than other components, and really, GPU upgrades can keep you gaming happy on an older CPU/motherboard. It's the mention of Apple computers that discredits the entire thing. The suggestion that you can't get a prebuilt gaming PC or easily upgrade a pre-built machine with a sweet GPU and game like crazy is just silly. And that's before coming around to the whole "who games on a Mac?" issue.
The summary, at least, is written to imply that if you want a PC you have to assemble it yourself, or buy a Mac - what a load of nonsense and lies!
Other responses have listed many places which will build a gaming PC for you, or offer pre-built systems.
I do assemble my own, but I'd never assume that that means everyone else has to.
Meanwhile, that $200 console is going to need a $500-$1000(or more) big-screen TV
More like 300 -400, which people already have to...you know....WATCH TV.
if you want some l33t controllers that give you an edge in the game, that's gonna set you back at least $100 more - per controller. Oh, and if you want a pretty cover for that controller to make you look bad-assed? that's an extra $150.)
Very few console gamers actualy buy those.
Starts off talking about building a gaming PC and how "hard it is". It's not, it's only hard if you are an illiterate idiot. Ends rant by suggesting MACS are better. Ok, this isn't even clever MAC spam.
If you want to spend $150 on a case, you can already get a case that works as you describe. The only place you will need tools is to mount the motherboard to a tray that slides in and out of the case, and maybe to secure the power supply - using thumbscrews for the PS often conflicts with the case sides. However, it's worth noting that my $40 case has all the important features you mention except for screwless drive retention, which I do admit is a nice one and I have a couple of prebuilts here with that, one IBM and one HP IIRC. I can swap drives without tools. The motherboard is screwed in, but it's unusual to replace one anyway. (Ironically, I have done, but it's still unusual.)
In any case, building one's own PC is already quite easy. Anyone who tries can do it, if they just follow the directions that any halfway decent equipment comes with. My $40 case came with instructions as to what to do about motherboard mounting, my motherboard had setup documentation, my video card had install documentation, my SSD had install documentation... stop me when this gets boring. Back when you had a good chance of getting unkeyed ribbon cables with your system, things were a bit sketchy. Now? Things plug in only one way, and then they work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well "vegetable-level idiocy" is still smarter than a millennial with a Mac so...
I guess that if you need one of the top500 supercomputers to run your videogame... Back in the 80s there were video games hard as hell. All that was needed was a good story, not that the characters looked terribly real or physics that felt real. It's video games, for terribly real stuff we already have the real world.
Yes because for the average person who buys a dell, which come with 200W power supplies, making sure your "400 psu w has 'right' connections' is so easy.Simple!!
Or you could just leave that one unscrewed. It's a motherboard, not a monkey bar.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Who buys a 1TB SSD for a standard gaming system?
I did. Because master race. That and it was on sale. And it is super fast. And I have been running it for over a year and haven't had any issues.
Or, you can just remove the PS, which you would have had to do with a smaller case anyway.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
An Alienware is a Dell. Alienware is not the company it used to be. Even then, either are fine for gaming.
... at my local store, they ask 30$ and they assemble everything, including installing your OS of choice.
Way cheaper than Apple product that are hard and costly to upgrade.
Oh, I've installed hundreds of motherboards and seen a lot of things but nothing like what I just described. The closest I've seen to those kind of interfaces have been on a server chassis.
The last I've seen you are still pushing cards down in slots and trying to route those usb cables to their sockets on the board. There are still wires aplenty clogging up a case.
These things have come a long way since the year 2000 but considering this is tech and that was 16 years ago... they actually aren't all that much different. The led and button connectors that interface from the case to the board are somewhat more standard than they used to be and solidified into a single connector that is keyed like old IDE and floppy links used to be but not yet secured like power connections and sometimes, if the card fits well, you don't have to screw down individual cards anymore, they clamp down. Woohoo. Oh, and it's now actually kind of a pain to find decent fans without stupid leds on them.
The hardest part of building a PC is, was, and always will be selecting components but assembly could be much easier than it is. Hell by this point not only should there be a case bus sliding your motherboard card into connects with but your case bus should have a network link and you should be able to specify an OS list resulting in the drivers to be downloaded to a small piece of memory on your board which can then be checked by the OS so every device becomes truly plug n play.
yeah, i mean what kind of geek do you have to be to unplug connectors that go in only one way, unscrew 4 screws holding the PSU in place, then reverse the operation to install the new one. 5 minutes of google or youtube would show even the dumbest of people how to do it.
I blame Apple personally. They've created a ridiculous perception that computers (to include smartphones) are mysterious devices that the average person not only cannot fathom, but has no business even trying to mess with. They offer 'Genius' support for farks sake. How can any Apple user not be insulted by that? 'Just bring it in, we're smarter than you! If you don't pay for us to plug things in, who knows what might happen to the universe?' If this was limited to the relative minority of people that actually use Apple computers it would be sad, but not so harmful. Unfortunately, with their massive phone and tablet user base, this mindset expands to encompass any device more sophisticated than a toaster.
If standardized it would ultimate be as cheap as the current (good enough for you but not everyone) solution.
How old was the person that wrote this? Perhaps 2 years old?
Any hobby takes investment and time... Would you say building your own car or tinkering takes too much time and money? How about Rock climbing? You need gear, money, time, understanding of locations, etc... Any hobby is like this.
If you don't like it... don't do it. And complain to someone who cares to hear your crying.
Muggle fails to build pc then rags on pc gaming instead of pc building, more non-news at eleven.
Didn't take long to find this little jewel to solve all your problem : https://pcpartpicker.com/
Yes, it's easy to find fairly current websites that will recommend a complete build. It's also quite easy to find a list of compatible hardware, recommended power supply wattage, and due to a highly competitive market the price of a fairly decent gaming machine will be between 1&1.2k all in, including O/S. Speaking of O/S, go ahead and speak ill of Microsoft all you want, a fresh install on new, or even old, hardware will likely begin with at least a working driver for each component, though it may not be optimized. Motherboards come with a disc containing drivers that fill in those that are missing, and you'll also likely start with a network connection so that you can download the best drivers available. Best of all, you don't end up with the shit bloatware that companies like HP dump on your stock purchase PC.
If a group of people enjoy building systems and playing games that are beyond the ability of a bunch of bird flappers and mole whackers, why not?
Does that mean we have to dumb down game specs so Rufus the Dufus can play it on a cheap LG tablet?
For what some tablet-pokers spend on Starbucks or Chipotle every year they could probably afford a decent Xidax or Alienware that would at least get them into the mix, though not in the uber 1337 league. You get what you pay for.
OTOH, maybe the games, at least some of them, that have way more depth and complexity than Farmville are just "too hard" for some folks.
So what? Everyone can't shoot hoops against Labron. Everyone can't afford an F1 car. Life just isn't fair, in jobs, relationships, or gaming. Get over it.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Seriously, this. Case in point, I just bought an off-lease ThinkCentre with 8 gigs of ram and an i5 for about $150, swapped the PSU from my previous PC because it didn't have a 6-pin power connector, and it's ready for whatever GPU you want to slap in it. I just used my existing GTX650 Ti Boost until the 1070 is more available here.
The only serious downside is that the CPU is not overclockable (almost guaranteed in a business machine), which is the only thing preventing it from being 90% as good as any latest quad core CPU.
Building a gaming PC is easier now than it has ever been.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of PC resellers who assemble, test, and ship the completed PC to you. You choose what kind of PC you want with the parts you want (usually from a few templates, like Office PC, Gaming PC, etc., with a few choices for upgrades) and you pay a relatively small uptick in price for this service, like 20%. For someone who doesn't want to (or can't because of sausage fingers) assemble their own PC, it's a legitimate choice that many companies and consumers make.
Because consoles don't usually render at it. Most games on current consoles render at 1600x900 or 1280x720, usually at 30fps and are then scaled to whatever screen you have. So setting a target of 1080p60 for a PC to be like a console is not accurate for most games. They have a few that are like that, but not many.
...When I decided I needed a new system, I called up my independent computer shop, described my needs, and he built me a rig that met all my needs for a very decent price in a custom build. And yeah, I could have built it myself... but I've got other fish to fry.
And there are at least four computer shops still in town. One, the fifth, closed recently (sad, as that was the place to go if you were a self-builder.) And I'm not counting Best Buy in that mix at all.
I read TFA, and it's even worse than I thought.
The guy is, of his own admission, a noob at building PCs, and he chooses to water cool his CPU.
SMFH.
would be better off buying a pre-built gaming PC from the likes of Alienware, CyberPower, Falcon Northwest, and so on. They cost less than a comparable Apple computer, and remain relevant (useful) longer than any Apple computer. At most you will get 3 years out of an Apple device before Apple decides to arbitrarily obsolete it by releasing an OS upgrade that does not support your processor or GPU.
For anyone that cannot afford either of the above there are two options: build a PC yourself ($400-$800 is all you really need to spend) or buy a game console. If someone is spending over a thousand dollars on a PC they build themselves they are either spending too much or better damn well be a hardcore gamer that knows what they are doing. 99% of gamer's would be perfectly fine with an AMD A10-7890K APU ($149) but instead waste $350 on an Intel 6700K CPU.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
If you're not a technician, you shouldn't be inside a PC anyway! What kind of a moron wrote this article???
Costly? Seriously? I can build a small gaming rig for less than $250.
These things have come a long way since the year 2000 but considering this is tech and that was 16 years ago... they actually aren't all that much different.
The last few things that permit customization just can't reasonably be changed. A decent case will at least let you hide the cables. I don't mean expensive, either. My case (It's an NZXT, IIRC the Source 220) has screwless drive bays and thumbscrews for the case panels, cost about fifty bucks with tax, and has long cables with adequate room to hide them. It also has all the airflow you could ever want (came with two quiet 220mm tacho fans, too) and can accomodate front- or rear-mounted radiators. It's not the only case like this, but it was the cheapest one I could find which also had both USB2 and USB3 (sadly, only one of each) on the front panel.
On the other hand, I would like to see a standard like you're talking about, for small builds. Bring back passive backplanes! It seems like there could easily be a PCI-Express standard whipped up for this. You'd need a cardedge that could accommodate a fairly serious number of lanes, say 64. You'd only expect manufacturers to implement a minimum of about 20. That way, no matter what you plugged in, you could still have the basic functionality. You'd also take the front panel connector signals off there. The case could then include either a simple PCI-E passthrough, or a more complex bridge, depending on its market position.
There have been PCs constructed the way you describe, but they have never been designed as a standard... because you can't come up with one such standard that won't be wasteful. That's why we have (and have had) so very many motherboard standards. We could have one built the way I describe, but I suspect the market would reject the cost and uncertainty of having a more complex case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or just select your games appropriately. I have no problem with my hardware, a VT-55, running my game of choice, Nethack. Only problem is the EPROM character generator (a 1702) is now more than thirty years over its design life, and some of the pixels flicker on and off due to read disturbs.
I don't particularly care for the keyboard, but the amber vt220s are pretty easy on the eyes... and the termcap
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
C'mon everybody knows the soundcard uses base address 220, irq 5 and dma 1. Get your jumpers straight.
or just buy a goddamn PC, you idiot. I mean, you probably need one anyway...
Seriously. "I was literally bleeding from a cut on my hand." My word, literal blood? It's amazing he didn't faint! Meanwhile, I'm still playing on a prefab-gaming machine I bought in 2013 for $600 (plus a recently acquired 9 series graphic card at $150), and I'm yet to hit a new title that I can't run smoothly at medium or max settings. A $2k+ machine is a choice, like a Rolls-Royce; you can get to where you want to go for far less.
... something required?
If you don't have the manual skill and technical knowledge, there are pre-built machines. If you want a "just works" experience, buy a console. But whining that something is "hard" only because it actually requires some homework and skill which you don't have is not going to help.
Heck, most people are incapable of changing oil in their cars, some can't replace even a flat tire or a broken lightbulb. And nobody seems to whine that driving is difficult because of it.
This story just screams self-entitlement. "Me wanna!" - and if I can't handle it, it is everyone else's fault, because I am too cheap to actually pay someone competent to do the job for me.
Seriously mind boggling.
If I were Apple I wouldn't let you easily adjust those things either. There might be some backdoor mechanism that trips a "warranty voided" fuse, but as someone who designs silicon for a living I would not want to offer any warranty at all to people who operate parts out of spec. In addition to "minor" failures of data integrity (which are normally considered major - stop ship failures to us in the industry, but gamers may not care a lot), you are damaging the parts. Or at least some percentage of OCers are, who happened to get the fraction of parts that run hotter than usual.
You may not care if you replace every year or two, but many customers do care, particularly those that paid a premium on Apple HW - I like their stuff but I do expect it works for 5 years or more or it stops becoming worth the price.
Not a good idea to skip screws, it may be needed as a ground.
Yes, I bought a gaming laptop for $850. A desktop would have been cheaper.. Getting 40 FPS on Unreal 4 based games is good enough for most gamers.
Article is stupid and ripe for flaimbait. Comment at the end by poster is not even factual. Hate pc vs Apple fanboyage on both sides.
"Unreasonable amount of disposable income", that's quite a statement. Earlier this year I just did a complete rebuild that consisted of everything except for RAM and a video card and it ran me right around $750. That included a motherboard, processor, power supply, heatsink, thermal paste, etc. A video card and RAM would have put me right around $1000 for the best processor money could buy at the time and a pretty feature heavy video card, when people are out here dropping $2000+ just on televisions. Hell, people pay that per month on vehicles alone. I really don't understand people who make these bold claims. And as others have stated, PC Part Picker pretty much makes shopping effortless.
Unless you are going to somewhere like CyberPowerPC and having pros put together you computer, at more of a premium, it is worth keeping up with the best gear to upgrade your system. Self assembling components is the most cost effective way to keep up in the PC gaming world. If you have set a 're-buy a system' budget for every year when the new games come out, more power to you, but I have kept 2 children, myself and often a partner fully upgraded every year for probably the cost of one new system a year. It isn't that time consuming if you are interested in it. If you don't care about the tech specs so much.. go to console.
In absolute terms of the cost per teraflop of GPU compute performance, prices have taken a nosedive this year. The release of the GTX 1080 and 1070 drove down the price of the 980 Ti, 980 and 970 which are still more than adequate for all gaming at 1080p (even on very high settings). The AMD Radeon RX480 has given a huge boost to the $200 price point as well, providing 5-6 TFLOPS at a price point that could net you *maybe* 3 TFLOPS if you shopped sales, before around Q2 2016 (with the release of the 16nm FinFET TSMC process cards).
There are extremely few games that will really bottleneck on the GPU if you have an RX480 or similar level of performance (with max or nearly maxed settings and 1080p60). In 5 years, even AAA games will still run smoothly on Low-Medium detail on the same card.
The only reason you'd need a beefier card, or SLI/CF, is if you go above 1080p60 (which is distinctly in enthusiast territory at this time, not because of the cost of the monitor but because of the additional load that imposes on the GPU(s)) or if you want to keep playing the latest AAA titles on the highest possible graphics settings over the next half-decade.
The only game I can think of right now that gives these cards a run for their money is a 150-million-dollar, crowd-funded, tech demo.
Sure. ... But why ?
Someone asked why pc over xbox ? Because more work is more performance . In this case more work is less performance. Seems stupid to me, but do what you like I guess.
I can play any game I want. It just so happens that I only want to play games made before 2003.
One thing to consider too is that building custom PC's is much like building custom anything (cars, etc). It can be work, but for many it's a labour of love and something to show off at your next gaming event.
"There have been PCs constructed the way you describe, but they have never been designed as a standard... because you can't come up with one such standard that won't be wasteful."
You'd need standards for the card edge, the motherboard connection, and the case bus. The case bus itself would just need to be able to handle decent power distribution with dedicated channels to the motherboard which will need isolated wide paths supporting enough rails routed to the cards so you can eliminate external power connectors on video cards. There is nothing stopping you from having power breakouts for smaller form factor boards and/or cases that can't accommodate a full power bus or a SATA breakout. The data bus for system monitoring information could be simpler and smaller and for inexpensive devices it's all you would need along with breakouts for the heavier bits.
A lot of this tech exists in blade chassis in the enterprise segment already it just needs scaled down. I don't think you'd have trouble selling the gaming and home geek market on a new standard "Streamline" with multiple sub standards for these components. Gamers, Small business who can't afford enterprise gear, fanatic geeks, early adopters in general would pay a premium for streamline certified gear. Eventually the tech would be mature enough and costs would come down and everything would be streamline enabled.
Instead of paying a premium just for a case that didn't slice your fingers and allowed you route cables properly, you'd pay a premium for a case that integrated with your smart home. If you want LEDs in your case and on devices so be it, let them be RGB leds that you can adjust from your smart home app. Your case need not be smart enough to provide an ilo/ipmi type functionality (although it could, in an arduino/rpi world that is $20-50 tech) but it could certainly enable remote powercycle and monitoring capabilities.
PCs are in "late adoption" and mobile has replaced PCs as the primary economically dominant "computing device". In this technology space, appliances rule.
As an analogy, hot rod cars and repairing your own vehicle is only for a tiny "elite" that are analogous to PC master-race types. Both exist. Both are absolutely minorities. Both will never increase their numbers except with an always tiny minority of similarly interested kids.
This is simply what happens to ALL technologies as they age and become fully adopted. You can look at ANY tech for the last 200 years and all follow the same progression.
The funny thing is that most of the people I know who are hardcore console fanbois knocking PC gamers... spend A LOT more money on consoles.
Sure, they got their PS4 or XBone for $300-400, but then you start adding stuff like fancy controllers (and hey, you need two of those so a buddy can play, right), some fancy headsets, skins/mods, etc etc and pretty soon you're well past what a semi-decent gaming rig would cost.
Aaaaand then it's obsolete when the console makers give you a big fat finger by release the new 4K model anyhow :-)
Please note that this is for the "elite" fanboi type console gamers. There are plenty of others I know who happily play on both console and PC, and don't go full-retard when it comes to buying lots of overpriced options that they don't need for a decent gaming experience.
It sounds like he has a compulsion to have the very max best available. In captive brands that is easy because it can't be upgraded much.
But in PCs and some other types, you can upgrade way beyond the original setup. He is complaining about having freedom...
Just because something can be upgraded does not mean you have to. Unless you just have to be ahead of everyone else ... whoever that is...
You're right. Just because the link behind the article couldn't do it right doesn't mean it's too hard for most people. I'm just saying, there's a reason why he's writing about tech and not working with it...
Problem with gaming even if you have a decent ( not top of the line one), is that some AAA games are not finished, and sometimes you get the feeling that its not worth it to be part of the master race :(
Surely not ALL AAA games are bad or filled with bugs, with the ones that are are not helping us at all
Also
by Eloking ( 877834 ) on Monday July 11, 2016 @04:04PM (#52491389)
Didn't take long to find this little jewel to solve all your problem : https://pcpartpicker.com/ [pcpartpicker.com]
that rocks ^^
That link won't work on a pc. You'll need to buy a macbook and then click the link. It'll
Per your link to Dell's Alienware site, can a GTX960 really run the Witcher 3 @60fps in 1080p??? Or is Dell just fibbing?
^^ this was just a bizarre complaint. I don't even understand again how to be so smart and so stupid at the same time. We'll replied to AC
I am in the process of switching from AMD (meh) to Intel in order to beef up my Recording Workstation, and it is absolutely impossible to do any research for this field without stumbling upon 100s of articles that are written with the gamer in mind. It is really quite stupid to claim that this is hard - you can buy preconfigured gaming systems or pick and choose and have them built and the advice you get it usually not too bad; if you make a mistake you can always upgrade your GPU and have a way faster machine without thinking too much about future proofing.
On the other hand, trying to upgrade while holding on to sometimes expensive legacy PCI recording hardware is a buig minefield - the information about dpc latencies, buffer sizes, useful and bad chipsets is not so easy to find, and the answers are a lot less clear cut. Most performance tests (which are also easy to find if you can type into google) are based on gaming performance, and I would say buying a car or refrigerator *while being reasonably informed* of whether your are you just burning your bucks is a lot harder than gaming PCs:
It is probably the most overdocumented consumer article you can buy. And the writer of the vice piece is a retard. He should buy an apple like all the other retards, and probably stay away from computer games altogether.
All long as I can still play Panzer General II on an old laptop, I'm good.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I owned a VT61 once. And even a VT05.
Many older boards use flat tip screws, and I have some plastic extension plugs which have a flat tip locking mechanism. In addition to that, a flat tip works as a lever (sorry, but the CPU bar does not always work on old aluminum paste), sticky memory thumb tabs, holding wires out of the way, and even as a handy guide.
And maybe _you_ want to mess with variable capacitors with your fingers, I'll use the flat tip thanks.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Who the hell even does this?
I've never known a single person to care about constantly upgrading.
It is always every 5~ years just like a console generation average.
The only exception to that rule pretty much agreed upon across all 20 of our friend group and many gaming forums is if there are more than 3-6 games in a 2 year period that play poorly on average settings. There has only been 2 friends that have used said exception in a decade. (Mainly because some recent-ish cards were on sale)
My little PC works fine for my choice of games, which are usually quirky indies I can't find on consoles, or CK and EU strategy gamds. But, my gaming mostly goes on in the Nintendo world... So no amount of PC building can fix that up. I'd rather just buy a cheapish PC, but building is still a hobby, not a requirement, so I don't really see his point.
Or, is it like the HP Envy line. Sure it will run games at max rez..... for about half an hour then you can get second degree burns if you touch the case after it trips off on high temperature.
NRRPT/RCT
The price is still a factor though. A decent gaming rig is for time more expensive than a console. A superior one can cost ten times more.
There are places where you can buy custom made rigs and have them maintained to top standards, but that just increases the cost.
For most gamers is "Do I want a new car, or a gaming rig?" and often the gaming rig wins out.
This usually takes its toll on social life for guy gamers. Girls who are impressed by gaming rigs are rare (though if you find one and she likes you, you are set!) The rest look at your car which is usually a bomb, so you get labeled a loser while on a 100k salary.
*IRQ 7
Or at least that was what my original Sound Blaster (1.0!) was configured to by default. I don't think IRQ 5 became the norm until the SB16.
The fact remains that you are an absolute idiot talking about shit he doesn't understand or have experience with.
You can run the Witcher 3 on Ultra @ 60 FPS with a GTX 760. A 960 should have no problem handling it.
"Why would you go to the trouble of gaming on a PC when you can just use a Playstation?"
MODS!
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Heh, I had a hand me down TI 99/4a connected to a portable black and white tv set in 1986. Off lawn-NOW!
Because I don't want to reboot my PC just to play a game.
I'd very much like to see a moderating system rating the editors.
What? You don't have to lie about anything. Just use the pulldowns to select what you have and download the driver
Note that laptop GPUs are listed right there among the desktop GPUs. The driver for your M2100 even says:
QUADRO DESKTOP/QUADRO NOTEBOOK DRIVER RELEASE 367
All those reasons are why I build a gaming PC. To stay on the cutting edge, to choose and assemble the parts myself.
A console spec gaming rig if you already have a PC of some sort isn't all that expensive.
I3 6100
GTX 750Ti/950
8 GB of RAM
H110 motherboard
You can get that at about console price. You'd have to have a case with PSU and HDD to put it inside though.
If you have to order it all together then yes you're talking about twice the price.
A PC "ten times more" is kinda overkill, you can build a superior one like say 4690K + GTX 970 for maybe 3.5-4 times the price of a gaming console.
Can't you take a copy of some paper slip which shows what you earn and show her that?
I don't even know what matters more being friendly, having a good economy or looking good. In a girl I'd pick after looks, behavior and then economy but maybe they go the other way around.
1986? I had my VIC-20 in 1981 and my PC XT in 1984.
BTW, you're still on my lawn.
Sadly, most players will never make the switch because they rightly assume that it's too much of a headache. I can tell you with some authority, it is.
FWIW, the article was also accompanied by teases for articles with titles like "Do you really need a dedicated graphics card to play your favorite games?" and "Watch malware turn this PC into a digital hellscape."
So, in a bucket, consoles are better than hard to acquire, dangerous to build (ow, my bloody finger!), pricey PCs.
Or just select your games appropriately. I have no problem with my hardware, a VT-55, running my game of choice, Nethack. Only problem is the EPROM character generator (a 1702) is now more than thirty years over its design life, and some of the pixels flicker on and off due to read disturbs.
Alpha Centauri still runs on a 486. Who needs anything else?
I've built at least a dozen custom gaming PCs over the years, and it's not only more expensive now than buying a pre-built system (it used to be cheaper), but the interoperability problems have only gotten worse since nVidia stopped producing their all-in-one motherboard chipsets with a single driver install for all components. Now there is ALWAYS some little issue like the memory timing being off, or sleep mode not working properly. Or your power supply not being current enough and requiring an unexpected replacement (and new case to accommodate it).
And then you discover overheating issues, and are forced to add a water-cooling system to keep the system from crashing. Hope that new case you bought for the power supply can fit it without too much cutting and drilling!
For what I spent on my last custom PC, I might as well have bought an iMac. So when I next wanted a computer I bought a top-spec iMac (quad i7, 4gb Radion, 24GB RAM) for $2500 that runs current games great under my Windows partition, and let's me do my real productive work on the Mac side without worrying about Win10's spying, since all Win10 is used for is games.
The $800 dell you linked to has a 130W power supply. I guess we know where your idiocy level is.
A fat fingered writer feels badly that he isn't great at building PCs, and whines about it.
Got it, thanks.
Then buy a Dell. 2 different options for a pre made gaming rig. Either the XPS line or Alienware. The reason you do it yourself is to save money. Buying a MAC does not solve that issue.
Running VMware Workstation, gaming in a VM is actually possible, I can't say I would try it though.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Because you don't know how?
No, because I don't see a point in it. I just run Windows natively to game.
I use VMware quite a lot, and had ESX and Workstation installed until I had to replace my server board and bought one that was approved to work with VMware*
*-except the hard disk controller...the only thing that matters in VMware
So, I am now using Hyper V on my server and can't load the Hyper V management tools along with VMware Workstation, they don't play well together.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/d...
It isn't like it is hard to do GPU Passthrough, there are articles about how to set it up.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So the story is, incompetent hipster complains that only other incompetent hipsters would choose the things he chose and fail to put them together easily?
Dude should stick to Macs.
you've certainly been falling on it a lot lately... perhaps someone should talk to your parents about turning off your internet access during the day and encouraging you to go outside to interact with living people.