Ye olde geeky blog

Since forever, I just wanted to buy a brand new gaming PC. As in everything new. From scratch. A quick history My wife is a graphic designer, and in roughly 2011 she bought a new PC to work on. At the time, it was pretty well spec'd. i7-2600 with 16GB RAM, SSD. Basically everything you would want at that time. It was her work PC for 3 years. Then, in October 2014, our son was born. We both work from home, and we thought (not sure why haha), that for her to get a Laptop as her main PC would be great, then she can sit with the baby and work and things like that. So, she bought a MSI mid-range gaming laptop (i7, 16GIG RAM, SSD, GTX760m), and her old PC became my dedicated gaming PC. We have this room next to our kitchen, which is a glorified walk in pantry/storage room. I put a table in there, took a network cable through the ceiling and turned it into my man cave. I put a GTX970 into that PC, and it became dedicated just for gaming. It was awesome! Meanwhile, my normal work...

Hehe, the title of this blog post really makes me happy. If you've read through my blog, you would have seen that I was due to purchase a GTX 960 graphics card in the upcoming months, but something bugged me a little with that card... It's also a mid range card, like my GTX 560 ti was back in 2011 when I got it. But this time around, nVidia's mid range card is mostly a "power consumption" upgrade from the previous generation. I read that the GTX 960 is a perfect upgrade for a 560, but if you have a 660 or a 760, then it's not really worth it that much. Also, being stuck at the bottom of Africa means we pay a lot more for stuff than the lucky guys in the first world countries. And, as an added bonus, South Africa is experiencing numerous issues like load shedding (for my overseas readers who aren't familiar with that - basically our local government didn't think of upgrading our power generating abilities as our population grew exponentially in the la...

We got our first "Personal Computer" when I was 8 years old, in 1990. It was this weird and wonderful thing, and it had games on it! A few of them I remember included Sopwith, Pinball, Bandit (one arm bandit gambling game) and Blackjack. The specs for the time were, I take, quite good - it was a IBM (I think) XT machine, and the CPU ran at a cool 4.77Mhz, which could get boosted to 8Mhz (making games mostly unplayable haha) by hitting the turbo button. It had a whopping 20MB hard drive. a 5.25 inch floppy drive (360kb), 640kb RAM and the screen had just four colours (yellow, orange, brown and black). It ran DOS 3.3 if I remember right. Ahh good times! The first upgrade we did after that was to get a - wait for it - colour screen! I wasn't too clued up with the stuff back then, but I take it they had to put some kind of graphics card or something to that affect in the thing. Also, we got a very cool 3 button Genius mouse - I tried to play everything with that mouse heheh...

Funny how just this morning I blogged about looking forward to the GeForce GTX960 when it finally launches, and I just read that the card will finally launch around the 24th of January 2015. There will apparently be a 2GB and 4GB version, running on a 128bit bus and GDDR5 Memory. Frequency for the memory will be just over 7000Mhz, and power needs will be very low at just 120W. From what I gather, they will sell for around $200, so I guess around R3000 in South Africa. Can't wait!

After moving to our new house, we don't intend on moving again any time soon at all! So this time around, I decided to make the place fully networked with good old fashioned UTP (unshielded twisted pair, aka network cable if you didn't know). We use a media center PC to do our TV watching on, and this also happens to be the place where my ADSL router is situated (nice and central to give a better wifi coverage). So, in the living room I have a 5 port gigabit switch, which connects to our study with a network cable through the ceiling. In the study, it connects to an 8 port gigabit switch. In the study there's our work PC's and the NAS. Today, I've decided to take a cable from the study to my man cave through the ceiling as well - it was using an old 54mbps Netgear wifi dongle that I've had for ages, and the thing is just not stable enough for anything other than browsing the internet. So, now I have my man cave PC also connected with a proper cable onto the ...

My gaming PC is up and running! So far I've only played Dragon Age: Inquisition on it, and it is performing admirably indeed! Running the game at 1600x900 (highest my screen can go remember) with almost everything turned to the max. It runs great! Also, the Creative Speakers my awesome wife got me arrived, and they sound great. It's not a very big set, it's the Creative SBS A250 2.1 Desktop Speakers - they give around 11W RMS, which is more than what I need (for now hehehe...). And they look quite nice too :) Then, the mouse I'm currently using is my old Logitech G300: But, I did buy a very nice G402 recently, which is connected to my work PC at the moment - I'm contemplating moving it my man cave PC - in fact, I will do just that - I mean, look at how cool this thing is! And I did buy it for my gaming PC anyway, so it's the right thing to do: And, this is, sadly, the keyboard I'm currently using, a Logitech UltraX Premium Keyboard - it ...

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 ...

Yesterday, I finally got my Steelseries Siberia V2 gaming headset, and I couldn't wait to do a proper gaming session with it. Now firstly, I'm not a pro gamer at all! A gaming session for me is playing for 2-4 hours. Anyway, my buddy and I booted up Loadout last night, and I switched my headset over to the 7.1 channel emulation. Boy oh boy, I am not disappointed with my new headset at all! The sound is amazing, the mic works very well, and the best part, it's extremely comfortable. When you look at the set, it looks quite big a bulky, and heavy, but it's really not. And the USB soundcard that came with the headset is definitely better than my regular onboard soundcard. Here are some screenshots of the software (which you have to download - there's no driver disc with the device): Not the prettiest interface, but it does the job it's supposed to. Here's what the USB soundcard looks like: It's got volume control, and mute buttons ...

My awesome wife bought me this baby for our anniversary: I just unpacked it, and I'm listening to some music now as I write this. I've got it loud. Very loud. And it sounds freaking amazing! I've never had a decent set of headphones, and I cannot believe how huge a difference it makes, even to something as simple as listening to music. The bass is incredible, I can feel the set vibrate on my head, and the noise cancelling is spot on, I cannot hear anything from the outside world, not even me typing on the keyboard (can't hear that even when nothing is playing!). And, when nothing is playing, you cannot even hear the slightest hiss in the background, they're dead silent! NICE! I cannot wait to use it for this evening's Loadout session! I will definitely be updating this post with my experience :D

After months and months (if not years) of looking for a nice PC chassis that isn't too expensive, but also high enough quality, I finally decided on getting myself a Fractal DEFINE R4 Titanium PC Chassis. I've had my current case for waaay too long now, so it was time for an upgrade... See? That's enough to make anyone depressed. Besides, the chassis fans were really starting to annoy me, going all krrrrrrrrrrrrr every few minutes... (I actually disconnected the one) - plus this one is really quite crowded. And yes, the dust doesn't help either... (also note that my DVD drive isn't connected - when my motherboard failed in December 2010, the new one I got didn't have any IDE connectors! So it's been there the whole time, but I haven't used it since. Thank goodness for an external DVD writer that I have...) And here's the new case :) And I even bought (finally!!!) a new DVD drive (don't have the cash, or need, really, for a...