After a couple of weeks off due to real life and BlizzCon complications, Baranor’s Den has returned with a new installment. In this one Baranor delves into the perpetual problem for PC gamers… upgrading. Add in the complication of keeping your S.O. happy with his/her backup system, and things can get pretty hairy. How does Baranor handle this domestic issue without being bruised? Click through to read the whole column…
Baranor’s Den #9: Bits and Bytes
Once upon a time, on a planet far and away, the Elvins evolved. The Evlins are a cute-ish blend of two legged hippetyhop and a bird, and like nothing more than to live a peaceful existence, away from prying eyes and hungry animals. Elvins have two legs, two arms and two wings, a beak and an attitude to match… cute would be an understatement, they’re so cute you drop your gun and cuddle them whilst they steal your stuff and take over your planet. Yep, we are playing Spore at the moment here folks… and it is fun. Spore is a nice game… but it did show me something I was ignoring up until now, and that is that my gaming rig is rather outdated. How outdated, you may ask? Well… I turned everything on full, and I have a 19” screen, and Spore slowed down to a c…r…a…w…l every ten minutes or so, for five minutes. And my wife, who is the Lady of all Elvins, was rather disappointed about the end-result. She could not play properly. I adjusted a few sliders, and then the problem disappeared. A new problem cropped up though, as the lady’s first response was “but my Evlin’s aren’t as cute anymore… they look like crap.” Oops… ouchi… even my wife starts complaining about the graphics? Noooo sir, we need a better rig. So, what’s a man to do huh?
The first thing I needed to decide was whether or not I was going to upgrade my old pc. I was (and still am, the new rig is not here yet) using an Athlon 3800 with a gig of memory and a geforce 7600//256mb. When your main interest is playing Diablo II, your maximum resultion is 800*600. And when you are playing something else your maximum resolution is 1200*1024, and usually thing work out really nicely. Usually… Oblivion occasionally stutters, but everyone knows that is a power hungry game, and I could not play Medieval Total War II with “Large” or “Huge” unit settings, but normal, with 2400 men in a fight, functioned excellent with everything on max detail. So you simply don’t bother. Right up until a month ago. After mucho consideration I decided to give my wife my “old” pc, and to buy myself a new one. This eliminates a teeny problem: gamers tend to wreck their rigs a couple of times during the years they use them, as they install software component A or B without checking if those components actually work together. If your wife is also using the computer, it is no good to simply install something and then having to reinstall the entire OS because you mucked up the PC. Which is what happened last time I went to a LAN-party… turned out I had kind of killed off some settings, and had to “reinstall”… thank goodness someone else had originally installed my system, and had been clever enough to make a few disk images to make sure recovery of the installation was e-z-pie. Back in two, literally.
So, then you have to decide on the budget. Budgets are everyone’s personal thing and it is easy to say “you’ll need this” or “you’ll need that” but at the end of the day, if it’s a choice between stale bread or a better video card we all know we are going to be cleansing our innards for a while and play games whilst having hunger. I looked at my bank account, income and some other factors and squeezed out a decent budget. Nothing too fancy, but not really low either. I knew I was going to have to buy the following: Box, power supply, extra fans, motherboard, CPU, memory, video card, wireless network card, soundcard, monitor, mouse, keyboard… did I miss anything? Ow… DVD-player/burner too. But that’s cheap. Luckily for me I am going for another 19” monitor. Why, you wonder, would someone in this age of 24” widescreens purchase a 19” monitor? Well, I tend to get sick whilst playing 3D games like UT, and the bigger the screen, the harder it hits. For all my love of PCs and gaming I don’t seem to have the stomach for it. This does mean I need a little bit less money for the monitor, and will thus have a little bit more money available for the PC itself. Always a good thing.
The good thing is that Blizzard, my main supplier of excellent games, has a history of making their games run on any system. In a time when 800*600 was the norm and 1024*786 was no exception they released Diablo II, running at a healthy 640*480. When the norm turned up to 1024*786, the X-PAC LoD went to 800*600. They really considered the older systems in that approach which was one of the reasons why DII sold as well as it did. Everyone could play it. Of course, in this day and age of massive 3d multiplayer games and graphics which are getting pretty darn close to photo-realistic it never hurts to have a better system. Pretty soon I was exploring all the graphics cards, wanting to get the most bang for my buck. After much consideration I decided on a Saphire 4870 with 1 gig of memory. Costs a tad more than average Joe’s card, but it offers a lot of power. Coupled with a 19” screen it will most likely last me some three to four years before it will begin to show its age. In comes a 500-watt power supply, and I went for a Dual Core AMD Athlon thingie (2*3100 mhz). Coupled with 2 gigs of memory it should keep me happy for a while. I’m going to run Windows XP Home Edition for now as Vista is still young and icky (and buggy 
), and together with the hardware it should allow me to play say Mass Effect. Note that I didn’t say “play smoothly” as it will, but simply play… I ran Mass Effect at 800*600, but every time someone with a gun came on the screen and started shooting, I was looking at a slideshow.
The only thing that “worries” me is that new games might be tough to play on my new pc. Diablo III… what kind of system requirements will it have? I can easily put another 2 gigs of memory in there though, and if push comes to shove I can crossfire the graphics card with another one of the same. It is a relatively cheap adjustment. And since D3 won’t come out before the fall of 2011 at the very least, I can simply buy a new pc then *rolls his eyes*
Oh, and that old pc, the one my wife is getting? We are going to install a 4850 in that I think, as well as an extra gig of memory. Else she still won’t be able to play Spore on full settings, and what kind of husband would I be if I bought myself a new ‘puter and left my wife with the old one without actually fixing the graphics problem for her? Yes, that’s right, a husband with a bruised eye
Baranor’s Den is a weekly column that explores all things RPG and fantasy, with a special focus on the Diablo series. Views expressed in this column are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Diii.net. Leave your comment after the column, or email Baranor directly.
