Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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/
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
A midrange video card will use 150W max.
A midrange current generation desktop CPU will use 150W max.
If you're using an SSD, you aren't pulling the full load that a hard drive is capable of.
A 500W power supply is likely sufficient, a 750W more than sufficient. 1KW power supply is total overkill and completely unnecessary unless running multiple GPUs.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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.
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
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.
Actually, I recently built my gaming rig
Haswll 3.5 - ASUS Rampage 5 - 64 gigs ram - SSD for the boot drive, 4 seagate 2 terabyte constellations for storage, And an ASUS Poseidon 980TI, A Closed loop Water cooler for the CPU (nepton) and an open loop Cooler for the VIdeo Card (Koolermaster).
So yeah, I needed a beefier powersupply 1000 watts., and was a bit spendy.
But I use it more than for just gaming.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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:
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
Buy a thousand-watt power supply rated to 90% efficiency
Spend all your budget on a PSU of whose capacity you'd draw maybe ~30-40% at most? Now there's your problem. An 80+ PSU of around 550W would do just fine. Remember that the best efficiency is achieved at around 50-60% power draw of total rated capacity, and on most normal gaming rigs you'd hit pretty close with a 550W PSU.
-SR
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.
Alienware (*a Dell subsidiary) and other companies like them exist for this purpose.
Alienware went soft when Dell bought them. The Asus RoGs are where it's at.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
People are stupid and can't be bothered to take their time and read instructions.
Dell even print the directions on the box for unpacking and assembling an all-in-one computer. I've seen newly hired IT techs screw the pooch on that one.
This is a good point. I can play games that came out in the 1990s on my PC with minor software installs. I can play my entire gaming collection on my PC. Which is really nice, because I like certain niche games that no one is likely to remake or re-release. And let's face it, I can hit up the Steam sale for a super cheap game that's not a AAA and is still fun, whereas if if I'm on a console, you just don't have the same selection.
I will say that back in the day, it was true that you needed to change your PC hardware fairly regularly to keep up, but I think that just isn't so much the case any more. I do need a new PC, but my current PC (built myself from parts) is over six years old now. And even now, I could probably still re-use many of the components like the 750W power supply and the case, as well as the HDDs without any trouble. I'll probably go to an all SSD solution with the next rebuild, but everything still works, I just can't seem to play AAA's any more on reasonable settings. That was a heck of a good run.
Man, I just realized that my main drive is actually ten years old. It came out of the box before this one. Geez. Talk about a good run... but I may want to think about some new storage soon. :)
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.
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!!!
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?
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
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.
Top-end graphics cards cost more than $354. The rest of the components, yeah you could probably find for that price.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you can afford to drop $4000 every couple years for a high-end gaming rig, sure, that's a great solution. Most of us work for a living, and/or have kids to feed.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
If you've actually built computers, you must have noticed that most sheet metal cases have lots of very sharp edges, so one should let kids or the guy that wrote this article play around in open boxes!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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)
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?
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"
My fiancee encourages me to play on the TV PC instead of my personal PC so she can watch.
Totally unrelated question here......with that kind of setup, how do you comfortably handle a keyboard and mouse? Do you have a really high coffee table or something? A desk on your easy chair?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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!
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.
True, good cases only started showing up this century.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Not at all true. My laptop has been going strong doing all my personal computing needs for a few years now, with the added bonus of weighing only a few pounds and fitting in my backpack. If it weren't for my gaming habit, I wouldn't have a desktop PC at all. So the entire cost of the desktop[1] is attributable to the need for gaming.
This is not a strange situation among the generation that grew up with portable computing. Those of us (myself incl) that grew up in the 386 era have not all moved on, but that's the way things are going.
[1] OK, so maybe I can save $100 or so using the desktop instead of my USB external for storage overflow. Still need the $5/mo Crashplan account in case of a physical disaster. I could set the desktop always-on and use it to stream music to myself rather than pay for a streaming service ($25/year saved minus the power used idling it). I don't think most of those can work too well.
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.
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.
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.)
So.....you just have the keyboard in your lap?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
Stop, you two! PC Gaming is easy enough for nerds, hard enough to keep wannabe geeks out, and full of things to fight about for us all! Can't we all just agree to not get along?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
> An 80+ PSU of around 550W would do just fine.
For what? some people have SLI systems where just the GPUs can draw 750w.
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.
If you really bought that, then you have more money than brains. but hey, it's your money.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Which are perfectly fine to play most if not all games. A dedicated 'gaming' PC is going to cost you, but so is a dedicated console gaming setup - you need at least 3 consoles to play the majority of console games (PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo) then you also need to buy additional memory cards, specific wiring and controllers because whatever is in the box is usually insufficient. Then you do this every 2-3 years while plunking down $50-75/game because the systems die all-in-one too and the games are utterly expensive. On the PC you at least have the option of going for very well built, "cheap" games where $50+ typically gets you a very high quality game.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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...
No, that's where he keeps the joystick.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
For $4k I can get a stripper to come over and assemble the PC while holding the screwdriver in 'an unusual way'. It's turning the screwdriver that's truly impressive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Exactly! For a little while at the end of the 00's I was worried that the kids (18-24 or so) (technically at 33 I'm a millenial too, but I associate that word with the younger set) who grew up with broadband, streaming video, web 2.0 etc etc were going to take all of the IT jobs. The low hanging tech support and the higher end sysadmin and DB admin jobs as well--- BOY WAS I WRONG. Their parents think they are tech wiz's because they know how to install different browsers and get basic errors out of the way, but they're not real geeks. They never had to get a dial up modem to work in Redhat 3, they bitch about building computers like this guy did and don't pose a real threat. I love building new desktops, it's a lot of fun to piece them together and figure out the best bang for your buck. You don't need $2k to build a decent gaming rig, probably closer to $1,200 or so, but I haven't looked in a long time. So yeah, fuck this Motherboard author, wtf does he know.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
I just have a wireless keyboard and mouse, and yeah I'll either have the keyboard on my lap, or have it on the coffee table and just lean forward if I need to type. I rarely type on the thing though, the vast majority of use for that keyboard is search terms for whatever media is being watched. I actually prefer to play my games on my other computer, even though I was making the point that I could play on the HTPC. If I do play games on the HTPC I usually just sit on the floor with my back against the couch and have the keyboard on the coffee table, but I play games on that rarely enough that I haven't really looked for a better setup. I also have some wireless Xbox 360 controllers that are hooked up to the HTPC, I can use those for whatever games support them, especially NES/SNES emulators or the like.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Nice try, But I do have money.
Earned by leaving the parents basement and getting a job, which obviously you haven't. :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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. :)
I don't know if that makes any sense.
Anyway. "We" used to play Decent.
I'm the only one me and my friends met who played "key board only".
Most played with mouse and keyboard. One idiot insisted to fly "flight simulator style" with an "analog joystick" (Herosaga, that is you).
Problem: for some buggy reason, hitting a key on the keyboard turned the ship 'instantly', while cranking the joystick took seconds to turn it.
Funnily the mouse was "connected" to screen resolution. So if you had a 1024x760 screen the same mouse movement would turn your ship much faster on a 1280x1024 screen.
Anyway, I only had troubles with the Gaus Gun and the Vulcan Gun. Aiming with them was not working good enough via keyboard.
Why they did not win on me in 4 or 6 versus one games: I call it a target rich environment.
Hey, Herosaga, I know you are here! dared to write your first comment on /. ? (Herosaga is the guy who introduced me to /. ... or call him: Think Tank Frank)
angel'o'sphere is actually my old war game name, and I only accidentally landed here on /. with that name (because of Herosaga ... if don't find him here, however he is on de.licio.us)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I plan on expanding it. But the photon I bought was on sale with a rebate on new egg, so 1000 watts FTW!
I should of just gone with the open loop - Overclocked and running the new doom at max didn't warm the coolant up at all.
Was surprised to see that only 8-9 gigs of ram get used most of the time. So with win 7 16 gigs is overkill.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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/
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/
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.
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.
You know how you tell someone is a dick? They relate the attitude, experience and work ethic of a single individual to an entire group of people. Like saying one lazy dude is an example of an entire generation. They did it to my generation (GenX) and they did it to the Boomers too and every other generation before that. You are just in a long line of dip shits that think the world is going to hell, just like all the dipshits that thought it was when the boomers were teenagers.
You can also (in addition to other answers provided) use game controllers (e.g. the XBox controller or the Steam controller) with PCs and PC games, quite apart from other control options (steering wheels, flight sticks, etc).
Typo: You obviously meant Decant. The chem lab simulator.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I dropped my multitool in my PC twice the other day. Was using the blade to cut cable ties.
But I'm a clumsy sod, and it was behind the motherboard so nothing got damaged.
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 $550, which will play most games except the very latest at high/ultra quality settings.
And shops like NCIX will send one already built and tested to your door and save you the headache of picking it out yourself.
So for the price of a console you get a rig with the potential to upgrade a couple of parts before you get around to replacing it.
Apple would be buying a 'sporty' car, not a sports car. Apple doesn't do fast. There video card offerings put them into 1200 cc 4 banger territory.
The car analogy fails though. There your best bet is to buy an old lightweight sleeper (for insurance rates) then turn it into a crazy fast car with pure race parts. You select vehicles based on their performance parts aftermarket.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do current games get released for Mac these days?
Sometimes you'll see a port to macOS as a side effect of a port to SteamOS or iOS, as both macOS and X11/Linux (of which SteamOS is a distribution) can use OpenGL, and iOS shares a lot of API plumbing with macOS. And if a game is made with Unreal Engine or Unity, it's just a matter of checking macOS in the build options.
... if there were any PC manufacturers out there which offered pre-built gaming PC systems you did not have to put together yourself.
Instructions unclear, used my penis, now Russian hackers have superglued my balls to the phone and are demanding 1 Bitcoin for the solvent. Please halp
This guy doesn't have teh YouTubes? All you have to do is type in "$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/
And what if this PC happens to be a laptop? I'd really like to see how someone turns a cheap dell laptop to a gaming machine with 400 dollars.
I think with a laptop, you wait for when you would replace it anyway, such as after the replacement battery no longer holds a charge. Then you just get any new laptop that doesn't use a netbook processor. Intel Ivy Bridge or later can run many games tolerably, but you might need Skylake for the newest ones. Most new AAA games are based on engines designed for consoles with the equivalent of an Athlon 5150 anyway.
Ha ha, no. Apple and Intel are tight, and Apples tend to get the best, latest intel chips that will fit within the (ever thinner) machine they're building. Easy to look up.
The problem with Apples they aren't very upgradeable. You're often stuck with what you get, and maxing it out at purchase time tends to cost a lot more than equivalent upgrades on the street... assuming those upgrades would fit, which they probably won't.
You buy a Mac because it has a warranty, will be sold in its same configuration for at least a year so getting support is easy, and will be repairable for as many as 5 years or more (my 2010 Macbook Pro just got cut off the list this year). Most other consumer electronics have the lifespan of a fruitfly. That Sony Vaio isn't a 2011 model, it's a VWETB236623626-ASD23423 that had a two-week production run and was replaced months before Sony cleared out a thousand of them for sale at Best Buy. Your Apple will be current for at least a year... but a year in, it'll still be sold with the same, now aging, CPU. Trade-off. That's why you check the Buyer's Guide at MacRumors.com before you buy.
But it's FUD that they're putting 2-year old crap in new models. Except, maybe, when you consider the GPU. It will be recent hardware, but it's mid-range performance compared to the best of what's out there. Because top-of-the-line desktop GPU's like the GTX Titan doesn't fit an iMac, and sure as shit not in a laptop or a Mini. Apple doesn't build an affordable desktop, and even if a funny-looking Mac Pro is on your radar, Apple does a frustratingly bad job of updating it as newer, faster chips come out.
So, there you have it. For most of what people buy Macs for, this isn't a problem. But nobody thinks of a Mac as a gaming rig. A recent Mac will play, Steam runs on it, but if you're serious about gaming you're serious enough to build a PC rig.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Couldn't agree more.
Or this.
You forgot to groan "Lousy kids, get off my LAN"
At least I have it, basement troll...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Utter bullshit. Many TVs come with a plethora of connector types. I've used TVs for my monitors for at least a decade now.
Yet again bullshit. My machine is a tower with five fans and you can barely hear it. Don't buy cheapass fans.
One last time, bullshit. Don't project your woman's unreasonableness onto those of the rest of us.
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.
$125 extra is pretty cheap to make a PC into a 'gaming' PC. It's not high end, but she's only playing 1080p anyway, which is what current gen consoles are barely doing
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).
Utter garbage. I first PC gamed on TVs with an NVIDIA RIVA 128 w/TV out in the late 90's. It's been progressively easier ever since, what with composite, then VGA,then DVI/HDMI inputs.
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
Gaming PCs do not need to be loud. I cannot hear our 'gaming' PC at all. The only spindle is for media storage, which is indiscernible when you are watching something anyway.
Thanks for clearing that up, I wasn't sure if that was true or not but I really find Apple's lack of real "specs" i.e. what i7 is under the hood for the price you're paying on their product pages strange especially when you're closing in on 3 grand for a high end iMac. I build my own but every once in a while I look at Dell's site for friends who want to buy a Dell and they give you multiple processor options and name the chip. Having to go to a third party site to find out what's inside the iMac you're looking to buy because the manufacturer doesn't tell you on their own site just seems wrong.
I know there are still a lot of ATI/AMD fans but they've been taking a drubbing both on their drivers not being very stable and having frame rate problems (or so I read in the tech news) as well as price / performance compared to nVidia. I know that nVidia makes some really good graphics for notebooks which would fit in an iMac (I read that the 1070, 1080 will be coming to gaming notebooks in the near future), again it just seems strange that Apple doesn't offer an nVidia graphics option.
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.
> 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.
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?
English much ?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The couch keyboard just needs to be compact and wireless.
The best way to solve the problem of using a mouse on the couch... is to use a trackball instead of a mouse.
There is a learning curve, but it's well worth it because a trackball gives you so much more freedom of posture than a mouse does. I use the wireless Logitech M570.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
if I'm on a console, you just don't have the same selection.
And this goes double for mods, which extend the replay value of moddable PC games immensely. Without moddability in Half-Life, would there even have been a Counter-Strike? And without Counter-Strike and TFC, would Half-Life have sold as well as it did?
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?
Does a trackball give you enough dexterity for games and such?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think the potential precision is the same as with a mouse, but it does take a fair amount of practice to get to a high level for twitchy FPS or RTS play.
Cleaning detritus off the 3 points the ball rides upon regularly is important for best performance.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
what do you use 64 gig of ram for? i can't imagine a use case where i'd need 64G of non-ecc ram.
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.
Nope, but I cheated, bringing my own keyboard to the game sessions: a cherry (sp?), which cuold handle about 10 key presses simultaneously.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Most of it is either common sense with just a bare minimum of thought applied to inspecting it, or can be answered quickly via Google. Sadly a lot of people today have neither common sense nor the patience to look at something for a minute first. Nor know how to search Google for that matter.
Frankly, it boggles my mind that Millenials are constantly online, but can't use Google to save their life.
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.
Having money makes you no smarter in your hardware choice.
That's why I said "IF-THEN".
So... you have more money than brains, that's fine, doesn't make you special.
FYI I also earn enough to afford such a machine, fortunately I realize there's no point in buying that monstrosity for gaming.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure? I don't see any reason why a young person who doesn't create a lot of content would need a PC. They should be fine with a tablet, a phone, and a game console. Maybe better, really; they won't have to maintain a PC.
I'm not against PCs, I have two of them hooked up right now and three more lying around (two of them right behind me in fact) but I don't pretend that everyone needs one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have been using the same Logitech Trackman Wheel+ T-BB18 for many a year, now. I replace the crap Omron microswitches every couple years or so, when they wear out. The only FPS I've been playing a lot of lately is Robocraft, but I am highly competitive. Sadly, they haven't made this trackball for years in spite of demand (it was the ultimate wired evolution of the Trackman Marble) and so prices for used units are very high. It's a thumb trackball, which is what makes it viable for gaming. The other ones use too much of your hand.
There is a wireless version, also. But who wants that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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,
For us maybe, but the masses don't need PC's to do what they want to do as much anymore. It is not like the old days when you had to have a computer to use e-mail or browse the net.
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.'"
you need at least 3 consoles to play the majority of console games (PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo)
Not all console gamers have an interest in playing ALL console games. So you don't NEED all 3.
Then you also need to buy additional memory cards,
Did you just time travel from the 90's or the early "aughts"? Consoles don't use memory cards.
specific wiring and controllers because whatever is in the box is usually insufficient.
Again, are you a time traveler?
Then you do this every 2-3 years
More like 5 -7.
PS1: 1995
PS2: 2000
PS3: 2006
PS4: 2013
$50-75/game because the systems die all-in-one too and the games are utterly expensive.
$50 is expensive? Sense of entitlement much. I'm old enough to remember single-screen 2600 games going for $40. considering the amount of content we get these days for the prices we pay.....we're actually paying LESS.
On the PC you at least have the option of going for very well built, "cheap" games where $50+ typically gets you a very high quality game.
Consoles have the same option. Again, did you just time travel from 2000?
TV trays/tables.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Furi...
lappads /trays can also work,
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Atla...
http://www.walmart.com/ip/4856...
These are also handy if you do console games where a keyboard might come in handy. (I used a lappad now and then for EQOA on the PS2 when I didn't play at a desk)
Also handy if you use a HOTAS with WarThunder on the PS4.
And of course they can be used with laptops and tablets.
logitech once made a wireless keyboard with an included touch pad intended for console centric use. Yep, found them.
https://www.amazon.com/Logitec...
Iogear makes one with a trackball.
https://www.cdw.com/shop/produ...!
Though I never used them, I just used a TV Tray/Table/lappad with a standard USB keyboard/mouse with a long enough cable.
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!!
And this goes double for mods, which extend the replay value of moddable PC games immensely.
As if most games, even console games, don't already have more gameplay and "stuff" than most players will ever see.
Without moddability in Half-Life, would there even have been a Counter-Strike?
Probably not.
And without Counter-Strike and TFC, would Half-Life have sold as well as it did?
HL sold VERY well before there ever was a CS or TFC.
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.
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.
Agreed that Apple's web site can be opaque, but 3d-party Apple sites like Macrumors, 9to5mac, ifixit and others will give you the specifics. and Apple seems to be rather agnostic between ATI/AMD and nVidia... their focus on thinner and lighter tends to favor lower power consumption, whereas their use of higher DPI screens requires them to grab as much performance as possible per watt. What you'll get in the Mac Pro or the iMac 5K is plenty of power to do video editing work and rendering, with video drivers tailored and tested to run well on that model in MacOS. If they're not using nVidia, my guess is there's some reason they didn't make the cut, like too much heat, doesn't play well with dynamic switching with the Intel GPU, AMD cut a better deal for chips in volume, something like that. and Gaming? It's clear that gaming is not Apple's priority. Microsoft invested a huge amount in developing and advancing DirectX. Apple has barely dipped it's toe in recently with Metal, relying historically on OpenGL, which in spite of its promise has been hit and miss at best.
Apple is what it is, nothing more, nothing less. They do what they do well, but for other things you're better of with a PC. They're great for travelers and your parents, because they're reliable e-mail and web-browsing machines that don't break, look good, and they can take them to the store if they break instead of bothering you to come over. I travel with my Macbook, because when I bought it PC laptops, even the Thinkpad, thanks to Lenovo, were creaky plastic overheating consumer-grade crapturds (they've gotten a LOT better recently). But at home I work and game on a PC I build from scratch from time to time. My only problem is what to do with my old rig when I feel the itch to upgrade.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
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.
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.
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.
He's talking and people who want to play computer games, not geeks who want to build computers. It's easier today but still not straightforward.
Many cases don't come with instructions. You have a bunch of different screws and no hint which go where. There are six sata ports and they are different colours, which do you use? Ditto the RAM sockets... I could go on.
It's a geeks dream, but for someone who just wants a gaming PC it's a nightmare. Don't forget they probably spent a small fortune on the thing and are scared of wrecking it.
That's why services assembling such PCs are so popular.
Fuck off with your millennial bullshit too. This was the case back in the 90s, only it was even worse back then.
dont make me reassign your IRQ's you whippersnappers
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.
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!
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.'"
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.
"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.
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.
No, he clearly meant DeScent, the game where you remove the musk glands from skunks and other animals.
John
"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.
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...
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.
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.
I'm convinced there is a cult of planned obsolescence built into computer cases. Every one of them runs at a negative internal pressure so every speck of dirt in the air is sucked in over the drives and memory card slots.
I'd like to have a case with HEPA filtered intake blowers with peltier junction air cooling. Add some passive liquid cooling for CPU and GPU.
I've actually built a couple of positive pressure desktop cases as a proof of concept. You can pass NEMA 12 (ISO IP52 rating) tests for dusty environment enclosures by mounting a MSA Powered Air Purifying Respirator blower on the side and pump 6 cfm of filtered air into the case and a thin gasket on the sheet metal seams. (3M viton double sticky auto accessory mounting tape)
NRRPT/RCT
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
*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.
"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!
I'd very much like to see a moderating system rating the editors.
All those reasons are why I build a gaming PC. To stay on the cutting edge, to choose and assemble the parts myself.
First the sneer - no you don't.
and second, the smug smile because, wait for it..... You didn't read what I wrote.
It's not just for gaming. As previously claimed.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Why should I have paid more for the 500 or 600 watt when with the sale and mail in rebate made the 1000 watt cheaper ?
Are you some kind of daft moron that goes into a car dealership to buy a used yugo , and refuse to buy the same priced brand new mustang for a lower price because that's all you need?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
Yeah, whatever, everybody use their rig more than just for gaming.
Have it your way, your e-peen is enormous, good for you.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I now have a Elecom optical trackball that is as good if not better than the Logitech ones. There also excist a wireless one. Both are great and the extra buttons are great as well.
I also tried the SANWA SUPPLY PC Trackball Mouse USB but that does not feel right.
If you want a replacement, go for the Elecom one. I can recomend bith the wired and wireless one as I have both.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
I accept your surrender!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
A fat fingered writer feels badly that he isn't great at building PCs, and whines about it.
Got it, thanks.
Nice to see there are still a few of us.
The 'everyone gets a trophy' mentality means no one tries hard anymore.
None of my younger coworkers have anything is the way of problem solving abilities; even the highly educated ones can't think their way thru a problem.
If you highly educate an idiot, you get a highly educated idiot.
My last pc cost ~2k, but it was so over the top I'm still using it 4 years later, playing with all the eyecandy turned on. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
2 cents a month? maybe 3 ?
You DO know all about the PC I replaced right?
Oh no, you don't. Cause you'll keep twisting and spitting.
So I was shopping for a power supply and saw the photon on sale with rebate, knew that at some point I was going to be running dual video cards and thought to myself, Hell, I'll probably need the power anyway and it's cheaper than those!
Now what? C'mon, do your best :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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?
If someone is unwilling to learn anything, then no, they should not build their own computer, they should go buy a decent computer.
If you are unwilling to learn how your car functions, you can pay some schmuck $50/hour to do your car maintenance for you too. Are cars too expensive?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That board supports up to 4 way SLI, he might actually need the 1kW PSU in the future.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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, you've failed to answer again... oh well. Guess all you can do is be salty and upset. How you think you're doing me any injury when you're the one that's so fucking triggered... its baffling.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.