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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.
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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.
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.
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.
The beginning of IRQs not being a thing any more was with PCI level-triggering of interrupts. In order to complete the transition, legacy ISA devices either needed to go away, or have non-configurable interrupts so they wouldn't get in the way of PCI doing it's thing.
For example, you can still have a COM1 in a modern PC, and it will even be on IRQ04. PCI will rightly carve out a hole for serial UARTS on IRQ04 / 03.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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
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!!!
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 completely missed the point, didn't you? The point is that you are going to have a PC in your house anyway, unless you're one of the old people who doesn't own a computer. Since you already have a PC regardless of whether or not you use it to play games, you don't need to factor the cost of that PC into your gaming cost, because the gaming cost is only the extra money spent to turn your regular PC into a gaming PC.
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).
What do "regularly" and "seldom" mean? I have a TV that's about 12 years old sitting in my living room, connected to a PC that's about 2 years old. It's not even a smart TV either, it was years before those came out en masse. It has a basic HDMI port, and I made sure when I was building that computer to also get a video card with HDMI out (any modern video card will support HDMI out). It works with no problems, and these 2 pieces of technology are separated by 10 years.
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
Sweet, awesome generalization you've got there. My fiancee encourages me to play on the TV PC instead of my personal PC so she can watch. If you're talking about the noise of the actual system, I built it specifically to be almost silent. You cannot hear it while it's on, because it has several 120mm low-speed fans and CPU and GPU coolers that are specifically for low-noise. It has SSD drives, so there's no extra noise there. The only time you can ever hear the actual system is if you put a DVD in and hear it spin up, that's it. The PC in the living room is not a problem, it's the entire entertainment system in the living room. It's not the problem, it's the solution.
In conclusion, none of your points are valid, you're making up problems which don't actually exist or have trivial solutions for anyone with a couple brain cells to rub together.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.