Kine murdered ....

A multimedia laptop is fantastic at the workplace. Architects can show off their CAD schematics to developers at a construction site. My kid's teachers use them to play Karaoke nursery rhymes with preschoolers. Concept artists and their tablets in Starbucks tweaking designs with clients over coffee. Then there's me. Alt tabbing between gmail and kongregate depending on which direction people are walking by beside my office glass wall. The blue glow of my razer gaming mouse and oversized sennheiser headphones will absolutely not clue in anyone who's never played video games no worries. These spreadsheet drones totally understand the need to wiggle your mouse frantically while moving mails between folders and forwarding them to your underlings.

However great my love for laptops with dedicated 3D graphic cards, there are ofcourse limits. Some things they just aren't designed to do. Like grinding Contract Wars hardcore for a week non stop barely switching it off in-between urges for food and toilet. I've had computer troubles twice over the last year. The first was a tragic death of my HDD that left data unrecoverable for whatever reason. More recently was the cooling system breaking down. Both the exhaust fan and some copper plate responsible for transferring heat out of the laptop decided to retire unannounced causing frequent BSODs that erroneously pointed to display driver files. But the latest one topped it all. The motherboard literally broke. Tech support quoted me a repair bill that is half the price of buying a new laptop.

This unfortunate predicament of being offline did however present me with an opportunity for self reflection on several topics. Like ... Am I addicted to the internet? Was it me or contract wars responsible for killing my laptop? Should I buy a new laptop or return to my desktop gaming roots? The latter question is the only one that did not involve disturbing psycho analysis into my psyche so i devoted more headspace into it and decided to go back to desktop. I spend alot of my weekdays at home anyway and I could use the rare trips to the office to actually stay offline and make human connection. Like finishing up on my reading of fantasy characters in lands with made up names.

To begin my journey of desktop gaming rediscovery I started by reading up on every 'Budget gaming rigs under $1,000' articles I could find. These contain useful info specifically names of makes and models for components that people who know better feel gives the best bang for the dollar. I jotted down those that I keep seeing over several articles. One interesting thing I noticed in particular is the choice of graphics card. In the past, these suggested budget rigs usually named cards on the lower end of the medium range. The ones I've looked at so far consistently chose only one, the GTX 770 (or it's radeon counterpart). What's interesting is the fact that it isn't a low-mid end card. It's actually only one down from the (realistically) top end card, the GTX 780. The other interesting thing is the 770 is almost exactly half the price of the 780 making an SLI setup looks terribly tempting. After hunting down retailers for the various parts, my choices were:

• i5 - 3.1 GHz
  
• 4 GB RAM
  
• WD Blue HDD
  
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 770
  
• Z87 mobo and overclock everything
  
• USD 1,100
  

• i7 - 3.4 GHz (intel turbo boost to 4.0 GHz)
  
• 8 GB dual channel RAM
  
• 240 GB SSD boot drive
  
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 780 Ti
  
• H87 mobo and add hybrid SSHD data drive later
  
• USD 1,700
  

• unlocked i5 - 3.4 GHz (4.9 GHz overclocked)
  
• 4 GB dual channel RAM
  
• 120 GB SSD boot drive
  
• 1 TB WD Blue HDD
  
• Z87 overclocking mobo
  
• 2 way GTX 770 SLI
  
• 1,000 Watts of awesome
  
• USD 1,800 excluding ventilation and cooling
  

While it's hard to justify spending over a grand on what will essentially be a machine devoted to Contract Wars (and Creed ofcourse) I've quite had it with not being able to play games on detail levels the developers made them to be seen at ie. maximum settings. It's been over 10 years since I've last installed a game where it auto-detected my settings all to Max by default and I miss it.

Could be made cheaper if I went the AMD / Radeon route but located in a tropical country with inflated energy prices, temperature will be an issue so I opted for intel / nvidia. Also, being Malaysian means I do not enjoy the luxury of shopping for PC parts over the internet for cheap and have limited access to makes and models for most components.

Still have over a week to make a decision on which setup to go with. SLI looks less and less likely though as I am struggling to find cooling kits especially liquid cooling systems. That and I'm unlikely going to go triple monitor ultra HD progamer style. Overkill would be the other reason not to since CW is capped at 50 FPS and the only games that might dent a 770 SLI are ones that I dont play like Crysis 3, BF 4, GTA etc. A single 770 for eg. still rocks Planetside 2 at 60 FPS easy depending on configuration.

Anyway - Dropped by to let you guys know (in case anyone even noticed) why I was / am missing for the last couple of weeks and will still be out of action until the next. If you have suggestions on PC build or want to help out by sharing your FPS / PC setup that would be great too. I'll try and check in here once more before building mine to check out your input. Hopefully my next post in this forums will include pix of my new machine.. Until then, rawr.

As I don't really understand about hardware, all I can do is wish you good luck in your saga and encourage your self reflections.

I have something similar to the second setup with the i7 cpu, except I paid $500 less and have 16gb ram. I get 60+ fps on everything, including PS2. I went NewEgg.com and the maker is ibuypower. Give it a search.

From my personal computing, I have found that 8gb of ram is the minimum required for what I do (video/photo editing/gaming) without significant delay. Processing speed is important, but i5 processors you can get away with almost every application. My cousin who works pretty high up at intel (project manager for their R&D department) laughs whenever he sees people argueing about i7 processors being a must. And he explained pretty in depth to me on why they aren't necissary yet (way to long to type here, 2 hour conversation).

If I was in your situation i would be looking for
i5 processor
8gb ram (or get a comp that is 8gb+ capable and add later)
500gb< HD
Nvidia Geforce GTX 770
Z87 mobo

basically a mend between the first and second choices. The i5 processor will drop your price down by $150-$200.

Just my two cents.

I'm at the same stage actually kine,
probably the prices are not compatible but here's what i had in mind

i5 4670K
asus H87Pro
8 GB ddr3 kensington
2 TB HD
GTX 660

699 euro = 946,66 dollar

final build:

• i5-4670 locked 3.4 GHz (Intel Turbo Boost 4.0 GHz possible)
  
• 8 GB RAM Kingston Dual Chan HyperX DDR3 1600
  
• 240 GB SSD Corsair Force LS (560 MB/s read)
  
• Zotac Geforce GTX 780 Ti AMP!
  
• ASRock H87 Fatality (gaming) Mobo
  
• Antec 650W PSU
  
• Noctua NH-C14 Twin tower CPU cooler
  
• Cooler Master HAF XB Casing
  

Corsair's Vengeance Pro RAMs are better but couldn't fit under the Noctua heatsink so had to make do with HyperX instead.

ASRock's Fatality motherboards are decent and its' H87 is the cheapest board I could find that has Realtek's top end audio chip the ALC1150. Apparently on par with the ones on mid range audio cards. 7.1, DTS, HDMI In etc. Zero interference as far as my headphones could tell. Supports up to 600 ohm studio headsets if you happen to have them.

Updating everything atm while getting familiar with win 8 at the same time. Will do pix soon..

You know you're Creed hardcore when ...:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2Ivq4

messed up on the monitor ... the printed parts list retailer gave me indicated that the Samsung was 1080p with 2ms delay ... it is not and they misprinted. Gonna go and complain tomorrow..

what monitor you have?
I have the  S24C350HL with 5 ms delay

s20c300 ... looks like im stuck with it for a couple of months

Your computer is interesting, it's amazing Kine