PC Gaming

Ok I am planning on upgrading this ancient Desktop system once I get the funds, bought a 22inch LCD for a starter but I tell ya what, the world of pain am going through just now with Steam has reminded me exactly why I switched to consoles gaming a few years back

I upgraded mine in November and it was a bit of a pain. Personally I ignore the PC market for years at a time until I need to upgrade and then do an intensive crash course on current technologies so that I can make an informed decision. Some people keep up to date all the time but I don't have the will power to stop myself buying stuff I don't need if I look into it too much!

Still there is a nice feeling of satisfaction when you have a nice new machine with everything running smoothly having put it together yourself

just have to convince the Mrs its worthy My kids are now in need of something suitable for a wee bit of gaming nothing too frantic and also for doing homework, they have been barred from the laptop (wifes) as they have already trashed mine ( death by a thousand rice crispies ) . So desktop revival is the start, my eldest likes the train sim Railworks and its amazing how [censored] sluggish that is!

Crikey. Snap crackle and pop, eh?

I'm not the most up to date guy on PC tech either but Intel's latest Sandy Bridge technology (now that a motherboard error that leaked too much current on one of the SATA ports is fixed) has to be the way to go. Make sure you buy the correct revision of motherboard if going Intel Sandy Bridge (I believe the issue ought to be mostly resolved now).

If I were you, I'd get myself over to Bit Tech and have a butchers at their monthly build your own PC feature. They split it into relevant categories depending on budget and what you want it for.

Bit Tech Buyers Guide for March 2011

Let us know if you need any further recommendations but do have a read at BT and go through their hardware configs. They have a useful forum too with a million tech heads at your disposal.

Good news is it's probably never been such a good time to buy in that hardware is way ahead of software so you'll be all right until um, Crysis 3 comes out! And Nvidia are back in the game and a more competitive option to AMD/ATI Radeon cards.

Lots of good hardware reviews at BT too - just skip to the conclusions like I do.

looking back on what i used to spend during the cold war days of being better and faster than my immediate work colleagues You don`t half get some value for money now! Have already picked up a 21.5" Benq LED TFT for a hundred notes, my old 19" TFT that I sold on a few years back cost me £150 at the time. I don`t need something too cutting edge as long as its capable !

Cold war days? That would be the time we brits were in the east using communist technology like the people's ZX Spectrum and the yoo ess in the west, with their superior silicon valley, were using Intel 386s?

Life for us was hard but fair, it involved much loading time and many anxiety waiting for the moment the tape cassette would finish to load. And bam! Just green and blue flashing screen as the tape was inferior communist quality but meant that the producer could go home and have big lunch.

Great days!

I won't say how much money I've spent over the years, I don't even want to think about it. I could tell you how much my first 17" (square) TFT screen cost when I bought it back in 2003ish but I would have to kill everybody so the truth didn't get out. It was a lot more than £100 quid though. Ouch.

Edited by deleted (Tue 05-Apr-11 15:04:22)

One of my house mates has just spent £1300 on a pc - it should arrive next week. It is crazy money. You can (and many people do) go for the latest kit when you can spend half the money and get something only a small amount different.

I would hate to see how much his PC would cost to buy in just 3 months time from now. Maybe I will look if I remember

I`m even on ebay just now looking for some of the bargain tech below whats out now, considering my own system is from 2004/2005 Was hoping to score a bargain but wary of spending too much when it could all go on a new system.

I wouldnt bother with ebay, for the upmost you have to deal with 2nd hand tech and god knows what people do with it.

Building a new rig these days is simpler than ever, it just depends on how much of a budget and how much performance you want out of it.

I'd have to agree with FireFalcon. Wouldn't like to buy secondhand at all unless it was from somebody I trusted not to simply sell me something that didn't work for them.

I haven't had any troubles with Steam per se (except a corrupt file yesterday that was easily sorted). However, I don't like it and tend to avoid purchasing Steam games from anywhere.

Been along..... time since I PC gamed. Bought my lad a game on steam but had bother redownloading etc. Sussed out that I needed to verify the cache files ?? Xbox FTW on that front

Only buy Steam games. It means that the games are always there, and compatible. The Mac games are a bonus, well some of them are.

PC always no comparison to consoles.

Yes, I agree - PCs rule.

I find that if you're going for a cheaper system e.g. for the kids, it's better value to buy it from a store as you can get big savings...

I find once you start putting in i7 processors, Solid state drives and full HD displays it's so much cheaper to DIY.

There does still seem to be some people who dislike steam but personally I love it and if the prices match then I always pick steam over any other source. All you need is your username and password and you can access any game you like from any computer - you then download it and it it is patched and ready to go. You can alsosee what your friends are playing and join them. Tis ace

my friend loves steam and chooses it over getting a disc or other source all the time his only problem is hes only got a 3 meg connection so he always fetches his pc round and hogs my net lol so im not steams best fan lol oh and steam never have the games i play on the pc lol so ya no lol

I could understand Steam Hate when they were over charging for most games, but in the last few months they seem to have come down to a similar level as most physical stores. They are still one of the more expensive though, need to drop another 25% before I'll buy new releases from them.

Personally, I normally just wait a few months and get the game when it's 50-75% off. If I'm really desperate for something new I may get a Steam game in physical form for 25% less than Steam like to charge

As for the platform, I like it and don't really get why people don't. Horses for courses I guess.

As for PC gaming, tried a 360 for a few months and absolutely hated it, zero control in FPS games in comparison to PC gaming and I really tried to get used to it. Until consoles come up with a decent control system, they won't get used in this household.

And upgrading the PC is almost paid for year by year by the amount of over priced console games I don't have to buy any more...

Nothing will beat Mouse /Keyboard combinations especially in FPS and RTS games but i took to consoles like a duck to water and have no problems getting used to game controllers and i would never go back to PC gaming..

A usual PC set up will have you confined to a small office or up the corner of the a room or something of that nature,playing PC games in most cases if not all has you far to close to a screen/Monitor that in the long run can not do much for your eyesight.

If you have a good rig then you get the best when a Multi platform games such as Crysis 2 gets released,but as i have said in a previous post a lot of developers are turning there back on PC Development in favour of consoles because there is a greater return of revenue.

I know WOW is massive but they are far and few between and gone are the days when games were developed for PC first and ported at a later date.

Edited by time2die (Fri 08-Apr-11 15:40:50)

I don't disagree with you on the priorities of some developers/publishers, but there are still plenty of PC/Mac only games being developed first for computers. Usually sims or more in depth FPS granted, but I find those types of games much more fun than any console first-then-ported-to-PC game.

Consoles have their place, but they tend to lead to dumbed down gaming by their very nature (pick up and play for ten minutes type games), so control and gameplay tend to be simplified. It's one of the reasons they've had to enhance them by adding in achievements, taking a full clip of ammo to kill an opponent etc. That just isn't my play style.

There will always be good PC games in development where smaller dev teams can make good money. Sadly most of the big publishers are just releasing repetitive rubbish and charging extra for DLC that should have been in the original. I don't want console games being translated to computer games, they are normally not very good, especially FPS games. The quality of the big title FPS games has only dropped since the move away from PCs, IMO

I guess I just pine for the good old days of online gaming when devs actually cared more about the game than the money, DOD, CS and Red Orchestra to name three. Thankfully, a lot of those people still exist on PC games that support mods and put huge effort into their creations. Some mods make the likes of UBI and Activision look like amateurs, especially the bug fixing ones!

PC gaming isn't going to die off, it'll just shift away from the larger publishing houses to indies who'll put more effort and pride into their creations, in my opinion, the sooner the better. It's not as if they don't have an outlet anymore (Steam!).

Oh and my PC is plugged in to my 37" TV, far enough from my eyes not to cause problems. Easy to set up and actually boots faster than the 360!

Not a rant against console users, definitely a rant about publishers releasing half assed developed games with no soul

Problem is that games on Steam are usually no cheaper than buying from, say, Play.com

The other downside is that you cant stick the game on eBay...

Edited by deleted (Fri 08-Apr-11 21:35:27)

Issue with steam pricing is publishers set the prices, not valve.

But hey, they do 4packs and they do crazy discounts so its all good, its best to weigh up your options when buying these days, for example:

Portal 2 around and about the cheapest deal for the PC version is to buy it in a 2pack from steam working at 23.ish, next cheapest would be amazon or gamestation at 24-26 a piece.

Some games however use steamworks protection, meaning you activate the serial on steam, so even if you manage to get portal 2 cheaper retail wise its still activated on steam, same goes for homefront (25 retail 30 steam), civ5, duke nukem forever (27 from shopto with keyring, unknown steam prolly 30), etc.

Pays to shop about and look at the situation, but atm im getting to the point unless its on steam i wont bother unless its crazy cheap, steam is just far too much convenience provided the developer doesnt go full retard with 3rd party drm.

Edited by deleted (Fri 08-Apr-11 22:00:02)

Don't get me wrong i have enjoyed PC gaming in the past but as you get older i enjoy the simplicity consoles give me.

Some of my best gaming years were spent when game developers focussed all there efforts on brilliant PC games.

To nobody in particular but how come this has turned into a console bashing thread? Its been a long time since I had a PC for gaming and it looks like it might be a while yet! Just tried WoW trial and god my PC is slow, how can that possibly be, WoW is not taxing?? My AthlonX2 laptop with onboard GFX ran it better??? I mean [censored]

No console bashing as such, just publisher/developer bashing Can't blame them I suppose, they exist to make money after all!

As for why 'old' games won't run on an old rig, that's because they've been constantly updated and re-worked over the years as new technology appears.

One I play that is nearly ten years old now (Battleground Europe) was once playable with a voodoo GFX card and a Pentium 2, now an i5 with a mid range GFX card would struggle to get above 20 FPS in big battles! And their graphics aren't that great (gameplay and community above pretty imo ), though they've recently updated them, but it's a small dev team and what they have to do technically in game and server wise would make most other developers brains boil.

Edited by SamsonUK (Sat 09-Apr-11 12:31:51)

i really dislike steams patching system some titles dont get patched for ages on steam and the steam patch requires you to redownload all the game data rather than patching just the changed files

the old argument against pc gaming (having to constantly upgrade) doesnt really stand anymore apart from some parts that dont affect gaming nothing in my pc is newer than 2 years old and can run anything out today at max settings

another point i would like to make is how t2d is always going on about how playing on a tv in a comfy chair is preferable, maybe but i dont see why that requires a console the last 3 maybe 4 generations of gpu's had dvi ports that operate as a hdmi port hdmi can easily be run the distance to operate in a second room so your noisy pc isnt in your living room (and if you have a fat ps3 like me your pc might actually be quieter)

I wasn't actually talking about Valve games in retail store - I was thinking along the lines of Popcap games.

WoW got a revamp with the Cataclysm launch, pushing up the texture quality and spell effects.
So the minimum spec will have increased.

Yeah Popcap games are nuisance especially when they throw out bonuses to their own stuff, but thankfully theyre paying more attention to it now, bejewelled 3 and pvz were both released on there and given the appropriate discounts and stuff for preordering.

Indeed - I think I got a nice discount for BeJeweled 3

In reply to a post by Gzero:

WoW got a revamp with the Cataclysm launch, pushing up the texture quality and spell effects.
So the minimum spec will have increased.

Yep looks like it been doing a wee bit of searching the net, think I`ll stave of my WoW addiction till June then put a new system togethor Its my 40th as well so may get some cash to spend on myself, other than spending it on the house, kids wife etc

In reply to a post by ilh:

I upgraded mine in November and it was a bit of a pain. Personally I ignore the PC market for years at a time until I need to upgrade and then do an intensive crash course on current technologies so that I can make an informed decision. Some people keep up to date all the time but I don't have the will power to stop myself buying stuff I don't need if I look into it too much!

Still there is a nice feeling of satisfaction when you have a nice new machine with everything running smoothly having put it together yourself

I last upgraded in November too, and went for the safe Intel i5/AMD 6850 option. I tend to upgrade every 2 years though wish I had waited now.
Seen the Asus 3D monitor, 120hz of goodness. I would couple it with an Nvidia 560Ti and a 120Gb SSD. Maybe I can sneak the odd purchase past the better half before the summer holidays zap the bank balance.
As for Steam, I can't complain when the odd sale throws up a £1.74 gem. But mainly I rely on Amazon. From under £3 to £5, there's quite a few original bargain PC games to be had there, with low or no postage its good for the collector.