After building a PC for the first time a few years ago, I’ll never buy a pre-built desktop again (low or high end)
The amount of corners they cut and terrible design decisions they make just so you can’t reuse the parts elsewhere are not only criminal from a consumer perspective, but an environmental one as well
I’ve got mine through an online wizard of sorts, so I have picked almost all of the parts. And I understand your point of view but this is all I can afford at the moment, I didn’t want to try to build my own PC for the first time and somehow screw it up.
I’ve found being a patient gamer really pays off. I have a relatively powerful machine but I don’t generally play any games that haven’t been out for several months to a year. By then they usually work, in my experience, pretty flawlessly. Anything I’m interested in anyway. Which are pretty exclusively single-player story-driven games.
Fair enough, but not all of those games’ problems are technical. A lot of them just either fundamentally suck, or are technically well built but don’t offer anything truly interesting.
I understand this is subjective; but why would I want to play Ghost of Tsushima when I could be playing Hades, Hotline Miami or Undertale?
Oh no for sure I love a good indie game too. It’s just that if the ONLY reason someone would stay away from AAA games are due to the initial bugs and whatnot then they should try coming back after they’re fixed up a bit. But absolutely nothing wrong with not being interested and just rocking out some indie games.
On, Sunday, our sister site Tom’s Guide (which is a different publication targeted at less-tech-savvy readers), published an op-ed from writer Dave Meikleham claiming that building PCs is “a mistake”
I’m glad that article got called out. I would have been embarrassed to publish that on a tech site. Such a poor take. Like I get his point, but he pretty much broke the machine himself, then talked about how a laptop “just works”. Well it only “just worked” because you weren’t able to break it because you can’t take the thing apart to upgrade or repair it.
Building your own gaming machine was always the best option if you knew about new technologies, compatibilities, brands etc. The problem I see these days is that the market is really, really saturated in everything PC. Which makes the research necessary extensive and time consuming for people who are not exactly “on the pulse” when it comes to hardware.
So it also becomes a question of “do I want to spend the time to get exactly what I need for the cheapest possible price?” versus just checking some meta-sites that review prebuilt PCs and pick one that is rated good by the community instead.
I think the right way to go is fine a good local computer store with knowledgeable people and get their help parting out and assembling it. You get some repair coverage and benefits like that, they do the bulk of the work, and you can put your own options in on anything you’re knowledgeable about. It’s what I’ve done and it’s well worth it for the small extra cost.
There was a period where you could not find the 3000 series NVidia cards unless you went prebuilt. Other than that, I agree, always built all my machines after my first 286.
I’ve found lately GPUs are the only thing that’s way out of line price wise. CPUs are as reasonable as ever, SSDs and RAM are cheaper than they’ve ever been. If you’re willing to go for a last gen GPU you can get a great deal on the used market. I don’t think the situation is nearly as dire as this time last year.
My desktop has a Sapphire RX 480 with 8 GB of VRAM and plug and play replaceable fans. I paid $260 for it at the end of 2016. For what that card was capable of (fuck, still is capable of) for us to be at 8 GB 4060s and 7600s is disgusting. I mean three years prior to that I paid $299 for a fucking 7950 with 3 GB of VRAM.
If you wanna buy a pre-built, get a laptop instead. I laid this out in another comment on the subject. $100 each for RAM, PSU, Storage. $200 2k 165hz monitor. $300 CPU, $300 GPU. Not a bad rig? Add $200 for portability and you have a $1300 gaming laptop with a 5800x and 6700xt. $200 to be able to easily carry it with you is definitely worth it. Cause if you want a SFF desktop for portability you’re gonna struggle to get it done for the same price point.
Could I have thrown down $2k instead of $1.3k to get a stronger desktop? You bet, but it’d be sitting in the corner used as much as my desktop is now because it’s just not convenient for me at this stage in my life. The device I can carry with me to work, my living room, my bedroom, and everywhere in between is the device I’m going to use. I’d much rather it be a laptop than just my phone.
Upvoted because i love the breakdown on this comment.
I got an Asus rog g15 amd advantage edition for about $1700 incl tax in India, and it has all the things you mentioned and a 6800M GPU.
The thing has a really great battery life for a gaming notebook and i can get so much stuff done as well on it for my side gig.y only complaint about it is the fan, which can get really loud, but Im fine with the tradeoff.
I also daily drive a macbook m1 pro courtesy of the office and I equally love it.
Other than the GPU market, most of the PC components are relatively cheap compared to yesteryears.
This is pretty normal behavior in response to any game published by an AAA studio.
Intel is trying to break into the home GPU market, and you’re surprised that they’re trying to make sure a game that has a lot of interest is able to be run on their GPU?
People who buy or recommend GPUs expect to be able to use them to run any software that relies upon a GPU. It’s already a bad look for Intel that this is a problem. The article says you can’t even launch the game at the moment.
Imagine if Word or Excel or Chrome failed to launch because of the GPU you had installed?
They always do. The main reason graphics drivers are so fucking huge is that they contain tons of game specific patches. Nvidia has what they call “game-ready” updates which are supposed to increase performance of popular games or patch specific bugs.
Why? They do that pretty much with every major release, especially for demanding titles. People tend to build PCs specifically for a specific game, so the major GPU vendors want to fill that high end need.
In terms of looks, I will say the rocky textures are pretty nice. Also they managed to map actors faces without getting that weird bugeye effect so many other games suffer from.
The character models seemed pretty simple for such a demanding game. I was hoping at least major characters would be a little more detailed. Then again, this was from watching a stream on my phone, so maybe it looks better in person.
Aside from looks, the voice acting I saw seemed a little odd. It could also just be a poor script, but it just didn’t seem all that great.
But overall, the game seemed pretty good, but not something I’m dying to run out and buy. I’ll have some more time this fall, so I’ll probably wait for a few patches to land.
This is pretty common. A graphic card company bragging it can now run X game. Cyberpunk did this. Doom eternal. Hell, I remember when Dishonored 2 from a few years ago was the highlight.
Remember back when triple AAA games were released and didn’t need to be patched immediately so you can play because the game devs actually decided to make a proper functioning game instead of going for greed?
I lived it and fucking NOPE so many broken games. Check out AVGN or any Games Done Quick glitch speed run for many examples.
Games had less moving parts back then so they seemed like they worked, until you find out that there were entire spells that didn’t work in Final Fantasy or how you can jump just right and enter a game breaking bug thay required a reset (SMB1 minus world). Or how uninstalling the game would uninstall Windows (Kohan? And Pools Of Radiance 2)
Plus now they can make patches in between the time they start pressing discs (gone gold) and release, hense the “day 1 patch”. Personally I’m glad games can be fixed post release although I would prefer it to be more complete/fix at launch than usual.
Yeah, a mix of both would be ideal. The fact that we’re surprised that Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 were solid on release is a problem, all AAA releases should have that level of quality at a minimum on release.
If games are consistently solid at release, I’d probably preorder like I used to. Now I wait and see because, more often than not, it’s a buggy mess the first few weeks.
I remember those days as having no Internet let alone high speed, I recall reading old ads for some PC games. So they don’t seem as great as you’re implying because at least the game will most likely be fixed with an accessible patch these days. You’d have to do a lot more work to get one before or completely wasted your money in rare cases.
Also usually publishers set the release date, though in this case I’m not sure if it was in house or not so may not be a point, though you called out developers so figured I’d add it in.
Basically everything outside of Steam itself is open source. The only problem is distributing a device with Steam preinstalled, as that requires distribution rights from Valve.
I think that’s part of the issue. It would be cool to have an easily available ISO, and partnerships with manufacturers, like they did back in the steam machine days. That might make it more likely that we see handhelds without windows preinstalled.
I would go so far as to say that I would count that as a negative if I considered buying it. Who wants to be the weirdo whose handheld device lights up their surroundings with changing colors?
There are people for everything. But this group ain’t big. Being a handheld also means staring into the shifting lights. Like facerolling your keyboard instead of looking at the screen.
I'm not sure how good it's going to be, considering the lack of discrete GPU... but that said, even onboard graphics would be plenty for many games, and certainly for streaming them from a more powerful computer.
The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.
Framework is also releasing their GPU modules. Hopefully someone finds a way to make that work with a handheld as well, although the form factor of the module might not be handheld-friendly.
If somone wants to mid end game on a gaming handheld disregarding price, people have to hope that AMDs Strix Halo (40CU apu, 6700xt for example is a 40 CU gpu) is a real product next year.
It’s not like you’ll be installing it in there permanently. If you’ve got a Framework laptop or PC case for instance, you could also use it in there. Basically it’s a BYOM (bring your own mobo) situation, so when you’re not gaming on the go, instead of wasting that piece of idle hardware, it could be put to good use. Or vice versa. Maybe you already have a Framework laptop and want to convert it into a handheld gaming device.
The Steam Deck doesn’t have a discrete GPU either. Though this was with an Intel chip, and they don’t have anywhere near as good onboard graphics as AMD.
Framework’s already been encouraging this, they released some designs for a Mini-PC when they released the first upgraded board kit. I think it’s an awesome use case for old laptop parts.
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