Sunday, December 28, 2014

My man cave and dedicated gaming pc

I did it! I finally have my man cave, with my won dedicated gaming pc in it! And it feels great! It took slightly longer to get together, because my son was born in October, but I finally did it!

My wife's old PC was graciously donated to me to be my gaming rig. It's about three years old, but it's definitely not a bad rig at all! It's got a 3rd generation i7 CPU, my old ASUS GTX560 ti Graphics Card, 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM, and a fresh 1TB WD Blue hard drive.

The screen I have connected is a Samsung 20", which runs at a 1600x900 resolution. Not ideal, but for a start it's perfect!

I formatted and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional, and have so far loaded up Steam and Dragon Age Inquisition is installing as I'm writing this.

Also, my wife bought me a not too shabby 2.1 set of Creative Speakers (hasn't arrived yet, thanks to the incompetent couriers Takealot use - hopefully tomorrow, or all hell will break loose!) for Xmas.

So, it's almost ready to game on, and boy am I excited! I will gradually get better gear, like a mechanical keyboard (I hear those are great!), better mouse, and most of all, a better screen and graphics card.

I just hope the motherboard, which has given some minor issues lately (MSI Z68A-GD80) keeps on working, otherwise it'll be a good R5000 or so for a new motherboard and CPU (I looked, and you don't really get decent socket 1155 boards anymore :(. If that happens, I'll probably go for an current gen i5, but we'll cross that bridge when needed.

And I really REALLY want a GTX970, but that's way out of my budget at the moment - hopefully nVidia launches the GTX960 (which I've heard rumors about) in the new year - I will be very happy with a 1920x1080 monitor and a card that can run everything maxed out - the 560 is starting to show its age a bit, but luckily (silver lining) my screen doesn't go higher than 1600x900, so I should be able to run everything pretty nicely at that!

Will post photos soon!