Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I know it was to be expected. I also know that if I had bought my new PC with the intention of PC gaming I would have done it quite differently. The past few days since Friday have been a blur and kind of frustrating, but three days and over $1,600 later, I have something pretty darned decent.

Friday - Vista Score: 3.5
Before placing my order to generico brown box and co (www.cyberpowerpc.com) I decided to take a peek at Costco and low and behold I came home with a new computer. The computer in question was an HP Media Center PC. 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigabytes of ram, 400 gigabyte hard drive, TV Tuner, Radio Tuner, nVidia Geforce 8400 GS video card and a whopping 24″ 1920×1200 LCD Monitor running Windows Vista Home Premium. All was right in the world and as I started uninstalling Norton and the other associated garbage off the machine, and began installing my software I needed to use, I was pretty happy with the computer.

That evening I installed Lord of the Rings Online to get a feel for the computer’s graphics capability and that’s when all hell broke loose. I went to bed out $1199 not including tax and knew I was about to re-open the wallet.

Saturday - Vista Score: 4.5
I got up bright and early and headed down to Fry’s Electronics to pick up a beefier video card and some more ram. When I got home and finished my installation I had 4 gigabytes of ram (Vista only saw 3) and a XFX nVidia GeForce 8600 GT with 512MB of ram. The card set me back $168 and the ram another $78 so at this point I was out $1445 not including tax.

After installing SP1 the ram was great, but the video card, although a great step up from the 8400, left something to be desired at any decent resolution. Crysis ran ok at medium settings at a moderate resolution and so did Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, but just not up to what I consider acceptable so I was prepared to make an exchange.

Sunday - Vista Score: 4.5
Yea, Sunday just didn’t count. I was so sick I really didn’t even touch the damned thing. I did blow my nose alot and take about 10 hot baths, that should count for something…but I digress, and I digress still at $1445 not including tax.

Monday - Vista Score: 5.5
Having gotten little to no sleep Sunday night I really didn’t touch the computer during the day at all, I did know that at some point I would be making a 15 mile pilgrimage to Fry’s Electronics to return the video card I had just bought and get another, but we’ll get to that after the afternoon delivery. Dawn was taking her family to the company store so I asked her to pick me up a new keyboard and mouse for the new computer. I selected the Microsoft Reclusa Gaming Keyboard and Microsoft Explorer 3.0 Mouse. They showed up around 1 PM and I am quite happy with them.

About 6 PM I mustered the energy to take a little road trip. The exchange process at Fry’s is pretty painless and in less than 15 minutes I was back on my way home with a XFX nVidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of ram. I got back home and unboxed it, took a peek at the specs and then at my computer and realized my power supply was about 150 watts short of the recommended spec. Not wanting to brown out and destroy a new video card I had just plunked $289 down on, I reached into my existing PC which had a 500 watt power supply powering a 128MB anemic GeForce circa 2004, I made the exchange (not as easily as I had hoped) and was back up and running. This brought the total to $1626 and I had something worth using.

Add into that the purchase of Crysis, Halo 2 for Vista, Rise of Legends and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and this was not a very cheap weekend. I guess the good thing is I have quite a nice computer setup for playing around on with games and what not. I am sure Dawngrrl will be doing some great game reviews on some of the latest PC games now which is something we haven’t been able to do until now. But that’s the saga. I can’t say it’s been fun, but I can say it’s what I have come to know and expect from the world of PC Gaming.

To throw something interesting and different into the mix, I flattened the hard drive and am currently installing Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition on the computer. I’ll probably go pick up another 4 GB of ram to make it a atrocious 8 GB too