Gotta Go Fast

Last week, I wrote about how I upgraded my PC. After a week, I can safely say I’m highly satisfied with the choices I made on this. However there would be a few changes I wish I did before going in.

With a new AMD Ryzen 5 3600 under the new and new electronics to support it, I’m surprised at the speed it’s running. Despite of a bit of a bottleneck with having 2 hard drives spinning up from time to time, the 16 GB of RAM loads things fast. Not lightning fast, at least I won’t be hanging long on loading screens in video games. Surprising thing about it is I usually suffer sweating it out with my PC during the summer. This thing I think is running a bit cooler than usually despite recent temperatures being near or above 40 degrees celsius which would put my room in the mid-40’s easily. It sits well under 40 while idle and under 45 under load, though “load” would be running games that are indie or using less intense graphics despite being set to high in the games themselves.

Though most of the other parts after from the old build, it was more like a rebuild of a system than receiving all new parts. My 750w supply is still underutilized since the AMD chip is a bit more power efficient from what I’ve read compared to the new Intel CPU’s if I chose to get an i5 or i7. So I have a lot more power I can put into other things like drives and accessories.

Few things I’m living without is solid state drives at the moment. Originally I wanted solid state off the bat so boot times would be lower. I’m still about 5-10 seconds out from a cold boot but I would like to pull it down to under 10. Aside from that, I’ve read things that small solid state drives can be used to cache data so loading programs can be a bit faster as well. If I had the money, it would be the first upgrade. To speed things up and futureproof, another 16 GB of RAM would be handy. I would like to try and push it to the limit to of the motherboard, which says 64 GB on the box though the Ryzen 5 says it’s good up to 128. Lastly though the GTX 950 graphics card from the old system, I would like to push it to the 10 series. Only thing holding me back is GTX boards are still fairly overpriced because of the cryptomining surge during the mid-decade.

But for the cost of a full budget PC, having a upgrade with mostly recycled parts is definitely a life saver for someone with a environmentally and financially conscious. If I could recommend it, I would say buy a used case starting from under 40 for a case that would’ve been about $100. Preferably a case with ATX motherboard standard since the full size is compatible with micro-ATX/mATX motherboards which have the same screw configuration as the full side variant. Shopping for a cheap power supply is an option. Now 500 and 550 watt supplies are priced, but having a bit of extra power would be helpful if you plan on expanding by adding things to stick into the motherboard like an additional graphics card or powering a large water cooling setup.

With this PC, I’ve been able to play Destiny 2 without much graphical lag (network lag is another story). Kerbal Space Program is running like a dream, no lag even when zooming in watching physics go awry. Photo and video editing is almost snappy, taking about 20 minutes and under for YouTube quality videos that I’m reinvigorated to start recording again. 100 photos is nothing with so much power under the hood though exporting is still about 5-10 minutes which beast sitting here for about half an hour.

No doubt this thing is going to last me about 5 years, 10 if everything survives to the next decade.

Upgrades

Since I got back for working two months straight, I wanted to commit to buying some new parts for my aging PC. It’s not a luxurious upgrade but enough to keep it running games for the time being.

The last “upgrade” was a Asus GTX 950 to replace my Zotac 750 which replaced a PNY 9800 graphics card which I first bought with my first custom built PC. For ten years I ran with the following:

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU
ASUS P5N-D Motherboard
4GB of Kingston ValueRam
500 GB Seagate hard drive
LG 16x DVD Drive

Over the years I added 1 TB, refitted the Thermaltake Soprano case with a variable speed fan in the front and an Arctic F12 Pro fan in the rear. I don’t remember if the case came with its own power supply so I’m guessing my Thermaltake Toughpower 750W from 2009 isn’t a stock supply unit.

This was my first time I’ve ever purchased from Amazon. With stores shutdown at the time, I couldn’t necessarily buy local. In hindsight, it might have been a bad idea to buy electronics during the pandemic. At the same time, I still think I got a pretty good deal. If I needed to bring my PC to the next decade, I had to pull the circuits out. Everything on the motherboard had to go, which sadly is the most expensive part of any computer.

The CPU is always the highest expense. At the time AMD was still behind on Intel in processing power. Now the Ryzen 5 3600 is my first AMD CPU I’ve purchased and used. Along with a new CPU, I stuck with the same brands for all my products if not different models:

ASUS B450M-A/CSM Motherboard
Thermaltake 150W CPU cooler
Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB RAM

I don’t have a big budget but with a short budget, it’s all I can do. Though if I ever manage to get working again or receive emergency relief from the government, I might try and get a couple solid state drives to boost boot and cache speeds. Since this board comes with a SSD slot, I might as well use it.

The IDE interface is now deprecated, so my DVD drive still have to find a home. Also I never used my USB expansion port and 3.0 is a bit better than 2.0 so it immediately had to go. Sadly not everything can be salvaged. On the upside, I’ve managed to cable managed a bit. The case was never designed for cable management. All I need is a modded side panel so I can store the rest of my unused cables behind the motherboard. For not, have a bird’s net inside my drive bay will do.

A few things I learned along the way if anyone wants to swap parts. First, back up all your data! I lost a lot of personal files on my Windows 7 operating system so when I thought I could just upgrade my hardware then software, I would be able to keep all my files. Pulling an all nighter to install all my programs and a fresh Windows 10 operating system is a big consequence to lost all my files. I was a bit worried about installing the cooler onto the CPU, it was my first time applying thermal paste. By writing this, I guess it means my system is fairly stable and I didn’t screw it up. However I feel the instructions from the manufacturer did not match what I had so I had to improvise. Rather than using all the included parts, I installed it by slowly screwing down the cooler to the bracket. I felt a bit uneasy going off the rails with the instructions, but I think that’s what they were trying to convey.

Lastly, I’m surprised how quiet it is running at the moment. The loudest thing is the variable fan I’ve kept in the case. On high, there is a bit of buffeting (that whirring or whooshing sound made by the turbulence of the fan) but when I dial it down, it becomes almost silent when my drives aren’t pushing too hard to load programs.

Next step I think is to increase storage. With a PCI slot available out of the 2 (my GPU covers two slots, making one unusable), I could install SSD’s, a sound card, or a wireless card. At the same time, I would like to remove this tiny dial and hook the fan control up to the motherboard itself.

I’m going to try and play around with my new(-ish) PC build. I’ll let you know how it turns out in the future.

Love Is Strange

On the week of Valentine’s Day, I started to play the new prequel to Life Is Strange. I was completely blown away at what they’ve done with the old characters while introducing new characters.

As someone who played the first game, there are a bunch of references. While I know what happens in the first game, I did my best to think about this as the “first” game in the series. I’m not completely done but it is so far really entertaining. There are a lot twists and lots of moments where it’s fun and sad. Life Is Strange played with my heart but Before The Storm really feels like a heartbreaking game.

Chloe and Max are probably the two characters in any video game yet that reflects how I perceive the concept of love. It’s a difficult subject to grasp and no one would every get it right, but we all understand it in out own way. What it means to us and what it matters to be with and without.

The game feels so much shorter than the first but I can’t wait to finish the 3rd episode and wait for the bonus episode.

Lacking.

For those who have been following for awhile, you know I try to put out a post every 7 days or so. Last month it’s been more like 10 days until I throw up a post. I’ve been engrossed in playing Star Trek online and trying to balance working on myself and the things I’ve built around me. This includes this blog, the YouTube stuff and my photography hobby. Hopefully thing will get sorted out, though it looks like more events are coming to Star Trek Online, according to the in-game calendar.

The photography stuff has been slow but I’ve been slowly phasing out my Google Photos uploading and making use of 500px as a place to upload. I just like the fact my account name is visible in the address. I don’t think YouTube does that anymore, which makes the community a bit unique in their own way. I was complaining a lot about 20 photos a week limit awhile back. For me, it’s actually quite doable since the past few weeks I’ve been sending out maybe 4-10 a week depending if I have an idea. Definitely sticking to it and trying to do more in the future.

Speaking of more stuff, I’ve been trying to focus more on playing Tropico 4 which the campaign is being played on my channel. I think I might be burnt out from playing RTS and city builders. I might transition into survival or a shooter sometime soon. For the moment I want to get the campaign out of the way and maybe grab some achievements. One thing I’ve noticed is when you log into the game is when the achievements from the previous session will pop up. Strange they don’t reward it to you on the spot, but I’m not going to complain. I just finished uploading the last part of the first mission for the campaign, just 19 more to go. Yikes.

Until next time, feel free to take a gander and maybe drop of alike and comment somewhere. I’ll probably respond however I’ve been getting lots of spam comments recently on YouTube. Please be unique and try and not sound like you’re advertising, thanks in advance.

Settling Into The Holidays.

I’m almost done with work. Just a couple more weeks, then I’m going on a month long gaming binge. Recently I’ve been spending a couple hours a day at a time recording and editing. It’s been kind of bit slow since I haven’t hit the gym in a couple month, I should return to the gym but video games are so much fun. I would like to push hard to record all those games I bought so many moons ago, all 4 games. I doubt I would complete them within the month since most of them are sandbox games; I would like to at least finish Prison Architect, Call To Arms and one more (Skyrim if I can binge the entire game). Speaking of which, I’m about $30 away from owning the entire Skyrim collection; just two more DLC’s!

Speaking of games, I’ve been looking around to all the people I’ve met who would like to play more cooperative stuff. The last coop recording I did was in Insurgency which was fun, but I think I should do something different and interesting. Trying to see if there is a game I have and someone wants to spend a few months or more on it. Space Engineers does take forever to get somewhere interesting. I have Star Trek Online, I could do the story campaigns with someone in odd ships. I might return to The Long Dark, not co-op but I would like to at least die in the game. However The Long Dark suffered more like Stardew Valley where I lost interest. Ryan, the guy who I use to play a lot of Pulsar:Lost Colony, had Empyrion: Galactic Survival but I would like to go the survival stuff with a partner or a group. Especially starting from scratch and ending with a large ship or completing the massive project.

As I’m editing my gameplay, I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams. Not sure if I ever mentioned or tried to look up what I need to stream, but I recently looked up how much I really need to stream in HD. Safe to say, I’m no way close to a bandwidth to stream; maybe a 480p stream, could be less. So I can hardly play a game with a live audience, maybe some day when Canadian ISP’s were cheaper. For now and until next time, I’ll keep recording and playing.

ReUnion.

December now, work is slowly closing up shop and I’m planning for a long sleep through January. Most of the years past I’ve kind of shut down and closed off myself to the world during the Christmas season. This year I’m going to try a bit harder and commit to the things that have kept me here.

This week I had the opportunity to watch one of the few YouTube Gaming channels I’ve subscribed to, the last time I’ve saw the Gaming Lawyer play was during the early days of his XCOM 2 playthrough. Like last week, I’ve been kind of hoping around streams and watched people play video games, not much of a stretch to see someone I subscribed to play within a small community. Recently I’ve found him playing the remastered edition of Skyrim. It’s truly been a long time, much like seeing a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. I remembered why I like streamers; not all, but the few of them out there.

The internet coming into this age has bear a lot of fruit. The one I’m fortunate to have is this media to share an experience almost realtime. As much as people want to be within the game, I sometimes want to be along for the ride. I remember when I use to play video games with my sibling, I would like to sometimes watch rather play. Something about watching turns it into a social activity; to talk strategy, to compete right next to your opponent. As much as those days are past, the old ways still apply. We still talk while we play games, we still get fed up at a difficulty situation, we still have someone sitting there watching us play.

I guess after a decade of playing video games, I forgot what it means to be a gamer. After tonight, I realize I should keep in touch.

Busy Busy

Really, two weeks have gone by without a post?! Wow, I thought I had something ready last week. Anyways, here I am!

Recently I’ve been bogging down my internet with uploads of Prison Architect. Actually quite different since the last time I read anything from the developers. I didn’t realize there was a campaign and more items to build. As I’m writing this post, I’ve uploaded the first part of the sandbox gameplay and a bit of chapter 5 has been published.I still have a lot to upload. I do miss playing long sessions and editing it down. I’m still shying away from adding effects in Lightworks. I’ve said many of times, I upload to share and not to profit; well, that’s the case for now anyways.

In December, I think I’m going to push this new hard drive and play and upload like crazy since work is going to ease up closer to Christmas. However recently I’ve gotten into watching some live streams on YouTube Gaming. Like Twitch and Hitbox.tv, I have a major problem with people playing a lot of games from the mainstream. Mainstream games like Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, the new Call of Duty and Battlefield, it seems there is just a lot of streamers who just wants to play these games and nothing else. Maybe I want to see smaller niche games make it to the front. Any web developers from these companies, there’s an idea for you; make me a stream search filter for small games and streamers with a certain amount of viewers. Back to topic though, I’ve seen a lot of Life is Strange and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Kind of tough to find games to watch since the games worth watching don’t have streamers.

There’s my weekly update to my blog; more like a bi-weekly, but I almost made it through an entire year with a post a week.

New Game – Prison Architect

This week, I’m going to get back into recording gameplay for my YouTube Channel. It has been a very long time since I recorded anything, I figured out why. Stardew Valley was the last game I played on the channel and as I watched, it was getting fairly monotonous. I’m going to break away from Stardew Valley for awhile and focus on a new game. “New” does not mean recent; in this case, I’m taking a game I’ve had in my library that I haven’t played and I bought many moons ago in a Steam sale far far away.

Awhile ago I had bought myself a few games; Stranded Deep, Call To Arms, and Prison Architect. As per the title of this blog post, I’m going to start working on these sandbox games since I’ve had them in my library for the longest time. I’ve already recorded and edited a few episodes and it feels much more fun than the last few episodes of Stardew Valley I’ve put together. Reason behind going with Prison Architect was because the developer recently announced they were done with this game and any upcoming patches would just address major bugs. That was probably a couple months ago, which by now should be fairly stable and playable.

I think after I get a good chunk of Prison Architect completed, I’ll start on the next one and then maybe consider revisiting Stardew Valley. For the time being I think I’ll stop and enjoy what I have accomplished. Much like I did with Defiance, the MMORPG, I’m going to leave this one as is until I feel I can play it in it’s entirety.

Gaming Achievements

Don’t know about you guys out there, but I feel a bit off every time Steam tells me I’ve completed an achievement. I always open up the in-game overlay to see what I did to deserve a pop-up like that. Usually achievements fall under after completing part of a the game or the whole, then there are achievements which are very mundane. Some games are sensible with the achievements but there are are some that can be sinning against the purpose of achievements.

To me, a sensible achievements is story completions. It makes sense especially if you created a game that’s hours long. Another sensible one is when you collect an amount of objects. Makes sense to put a good achievement on a tedious task. If the game has some complex stuff in it, it’s even cooler if there is an achievement for it like saving someone from explosion damage or being able to react to a certain way. However there are a few achievements I don’t want to see even though I might have achieved these on my own account and accord.

I like a good achievements for a repetitive task. However a repetitive achievement for a repetitive task is overboard. As much as I can kill 100 bots, I don’t want to kill a million bots for an achievement. At that point, you’re just playing to kill and not necessarily enjoying the killing bots. This goes the same with FPS games which does the same thing but with a different weapon. I’ve played games which want the player to kill a thousand with one weapon and a thousand with another. It’s a nice way to push players to try these guns and grenades, but there is no point aside from forcing players to play with weapons the developer is lazy to balance or the player does not which to play with for the duration.

Mystery achievements, as much as they are surprising they sometimes don’t provide any contextual information for their completions. Whether in the icon or description, they can be fairly vague. Most games I’ve encountered have been mysterious but able to convey a point where they want us to do. For most of the time, some of you developers have to give the player some sort of clue.

Then there are games I’m not even sure they’re really games anymore with over a hundred achievements. I have a game in my library which has over 500 achievements. Most of the are hidden since Steam has the courtesy to hide the massive list. I don’t think I have the patience for 500 achievements! Early on I had Team Fortress 2 as the only game with achievements. Looking at it now, it has a lot of achievements that look intense. I did achieve the “Pyromancer” achievements but it was an undertaking. To spent years on a game to complete the list of achievements is as agonizing as spending years in an institution. Which gets me into downloadable content achievements!

This generation of gamers seem to support DLC to games. Nothing wrong with that since some of them are like expansion packs of the past. Most of them would hardly count as an expansion pack, but I digress. I don’t like achievements related to DLC’s, especially on Steam since the service clumps all the game’s achievements. Which means you can’t “perfect” a game on Steam without buying their DLC content. Which sort of supports the argument of games are incomplete until all the DLC’s are released which sounds a cash grab.

Achievements should be an enhancement and not the objective for enjoying the game. I honestly hope more games can do less in achievements.

Easy September

The past week has been filled with some ongoing things happening. Aside from the sleep and the much relaxation, I’ve been trying to get back into recording more Stardew Valley on my channel. I’ve recently upgraded my 8 year old PC. Nothing too in depth, installed a new GeForce 950 GTX to replace the 430 I had and a 2 TB hard drive. After a week running the new GPU through her paces, I’m starting to think my entire PC is under powered for the new GPU. Power is running great but I think the CPU might be having a tough time catching up with processing some games. I don’t know exactly is the problem, let me know in the comments what you think stuttering and “lag” might be. The new hard drive is working fine, I’ve managed to transfer my game files from Steam to the new drive without hiccups. All save files are functional thankfully so I don’t have to restart a new Stardew playthrough.

The original intent was to buy a new PC, but an old buddy of mine convinced me to upgrade the GPU and save the $600 of new PC parts. But the cheap guy I am, I decided to upgrade this PC; hopefully one last time. When I started up Insurgency to play, I had a few problems with servers that were located out west. Then I realized I was lagging from local servers too. Of course I had to pull off something stupid to expend the $600 I saved. Luckily at the time, a local airsoft store had a P90 in stock. I’ve been looking into buying a P90 since I started playing airsoft and now here it is with only an hour ride out and a few days of waiting for the shop to open. Of course the day came and I bought it under budget, still pricey for a airsoft replica. Nonetheless, it was less than 600 with a spare magazine. Along with the Cyclone impact BB grenade and spring shotgun, I have a few things to try out. Of course I’m giving my pistol another go even though I’m shearing the feeding lips every time I’m using it. If I get a chance at the end of the month to play, I’ll definitely give it a go.

Other than that, happy with my new purchases for fall. Maybe enjoy it as much as I can until I can find something to complain about or something to talk about.