I love my new PC. If I could, I would take it as my mate. Sadly, all of the viable penetration points in the case are guarded by spinning fans.
It’s been nearly six years since I had a decent gaming rig. Even then it was just a matter of slapping a mid-range card into a three year old shop-bought system. Before that we had a modest Pentium unit, whose main contribution to my gaming world was that it could run Championship Manager without a boot disk.
For those who are too young to know what the hell a boot disk is, allow me to provide a metaphor: imagine that your car doesn’t have enough power to drive to the shops, but if you put a floppy disk into it and then turn it on, it will suddenly have enough power because it no longer has seats, brakes, mirrors, indicator stalks or furry dice.
If you’re too young to know what the hell a floppy disk is, I hate you.
Before the Pentium system, we had a 486 DX2. It cost well over £1000 and had 8MB of RAM and 263MB of disk space. I know these figures well because I needed to compress the hard drive to install Championship Manager 97/98, and had to use the aforementioned boot disk to free up enough memory to run it. The processor ran at 66MHz. 66! For reference, that’s only 1/8 the speed that Tony’s brain can come up with obscene jokes. If my family had bought Tony instead, we could have run Championship Manager 97/98 on him, and it would have saved me a great deal of bother.
It was so sweet to finally play those games after having to go to so much effort to simply load them up. It made classics like UFO: Enemy Unknown, Sensible World of Soccer and Syndicate even better. As a result I love them all dearly and, yes, I would mate with them too if I could (but CDs shatter and pierce nastily when you try that).
So, PC gaming might just be where my heart truly lies. Those formative experiences have been the basis for not just my hobby, but also my career. However, this new PC represents the first time I’ve ever built a system from scratch.
Daunting at first, but I realised something early on that helped greatly.
You see, building a PC is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You insert things where you think they should go, and then you enthusiastically flick what appears to be the switch several times only to have it stare back at you glumly.
The biggest problem was mounting the stock CPU fan on to the motherboard. I couldn’t get it to sit right for ages, mainly because every time I tried to push it down into place, the motherboard creaked sickeningly, as if at any moment it was going to explode a shower of green plastic directly into my eyes. Fitting the processor was similarly troubling. There was a metal lever that I had to push down to lock the cover in place. However, the lever was stiffer than Ryan Giggs at a Miss Wales competition and, you guessed it, the motherboard made a sickening creaking sound as I forced it down. My face was locked in an uncomfortable cringe throughout this and many other stages of the process, but eventually we got there.
So, now I’m back on the PC gaming scene. I already feel persecuted, and suddenly I’m filled with incandescent rage by lacks of dedicated servers, or by choppy frame rates. I’ve spent 80% of my time so far changing settings in games, trying to achieve the best balance between performance and quality that I can. It takes me back. I’m already considering installing 64 bit Windows, just in case it gains me an extra 5 frames per second in Rift.
Of course the flip-side of all this excitement is that I now have no money, for PC gaming is like throwing your wallet into a special jet engine that explodes just after it shreds wallets.
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