Gaming PC - how/why/what?

[Asht_200]

Look back at the top of page 7 Clai . The scream and swearing should have made it's way over to Wales by now .

And to think it was rebuffed!

I installed Norton simply because it was cheap to secure my desktop, my laptop and my Mum's laptop with the added bonus of Norton family to protect my Nephews and Niece from all that nasty stuff they are exposed to on the Interweb

[Pete C]

I have an Nvidia card Del and I've noticed no issues with Tomb Raider, Lara is still as lovely as ever (OK, lovelier because she's more real)

[Delboy]

Cheers Pete

They patched it yesterday anyway so I'm all good to go even if there were any issues.

Think I'm going to go and chop in all my 360 games bar the ones only available on the 360 as I can't see me playing it much anymore!

I think game have a 2 for £25 deal on some games at the mo, or I may just get a steam voucher.

[Delboy]

So I decided to run a benchmark, just downloaded the 3DMark demo from steam and ran that through. Because it's the demo I have to run all three tests. The first is intended for tablets I think, the second for home desktop stuff and the final one for dedicated gaming machines. Got the following, but no idea if these scores are any good or not?

ICE STORM
Result details
VALID RESULT
SCORE
164390
Graphics Score 295570
Physics Score 64382

CLOUD GATE
Result details
VALID RESULT
SCORE
18452
Graphics Score 50577
Physics Score 5725

FIRE STRIKE
Result details
VALID RESULT
SCORE
6652
Graphics Score 7700
Physics Score 8052
Combined Score 2917

Also now have £110 of steam credit thanks to trading in my old xbox games, also got the kids a new Skylander, didn't do too badly in there really. Won't need to use 'real' money to pay for a game for a while!

[Stidi]

out of interest, when you bought your card, was the AC3 download code in the box, or just bundled with it?
just noticed that it isn't mentioned on the amazon site, so might cancel the order / swap it over and get get it from ebuyer. will only cost me another couple of quid for the same card, so might be worth the hassle if AC3 is any good?

[Delboy]

I had to email a dabs email address with my order number and they sent the code back for me to get AC3 from uPlay.

So far I'm enjoying it, the last one I played was brotherhood which left me cold but this seems much better so far

[Pete C]

Brotherhood was probably my favourite one of the entire series, you're just wrong Del

[Delboy]

Haha

I don't know how to explain it but I just found it tedious, too much to do (never thought that would be a bad thing) and I think I was just a touch bored of Ezio and renaissance Italy tbh.

[Pete C]

Did you play Revelations? Whole different Ezio, whole different setting. That was pretty good too I thought, still better than III.

[Delboy]

I actually skipped revelations because of brotherhood

Might go back and try it.

Having my doubts over 3 now, it's trying to do too much again. Trading, hunting, sea faring, oh and the actual basis of the game is hidden in there somewhere. I like variety as much as the next man but its getting to be a jack of all trades situation.

When its focussing on the story and the bread and butter AC stuff I love it, but when it starts throwing trade convoys, maritime guff and other shite I'm not interested in at me it gets a bit tedious.

Still, it was free so **** it

In other news, Steam have got 40% off the Farcry franchise pack at the mo, £24.99 for Farcry, Farcry 2 fortunes edition, Farcry 3 an the Farcry 3 deluxe bundle DLC.

Wanted to replay FC 3 anyway, loved the original Farcry so happy to play that again and with Farcry 2 adding up to a whopping £2 something as part of the pack I'll retry that too.

I now have 5 games queued up in steam waiting for install, I can't resist a bargain

Edit to add, despite the flaws mentioned around AC3 I still prefer it to brotherhood

[Cluck]

Ooh cheers for the heads up Del, just bought Far Cry 3 - have been waiting for this to go on sale . Now if only somewhere was doing Crysis 3 cheaply .

[Delboy]

No prob mate. Crysis 3 is on my list too, although I think I'd like to play the original again on PC as I'm sure the console port didn't do it justice.

I never actually finished 2 either, so might be worth fitting that in. By which time I'm sure 3 will be cheap somewhere

[TrIcK^]

Ooh cheers for the heads up Del, just bought Far Cry 3 - have been waiting for this to go on sale . Now if only somewhere was doing Crysis 3 cheaply .

Agree, apparently a very short campaign in cry3, I'm not paying more then a tenner for it.

How are you getting on with the new rig now then Del, every thing alright, any blue screens?

[Delboy]

All going rather well so far thanks Trick, been getting fairly constant use as AC3 is taking an age to complete!

So far so good and no issues, long may it stay that way!!

[Cluck]

Woo hoo, Crysis 3 is on sale on Origin - down to £20 . Consider it bought .

[Delboy]

Ooh! May have to invest, but I'm falling into this trap of buying things I want when they're on sale but having no idea when I'm going to fit them all in!

So may hold fire for now!

[Delboy]

Have been playing Farcry 3 this week, it's a sign of how much I enjoyed it when I played through on the Xbox that I'm happily doing the whole thing again now. Helps that it looks considerably more pretty on the PC

Happily running at max settings smooth as butter... Most of the time. It seems I'm affected by what appears to be a common issue with this game on the PC, micro stuttering. Every now and then the game just looks a bit blurry when turning/looking around or moving, not like motion blur, more like the picture dragging fractionally. There's a 47 page thread on the uPlay forum about it, affects a wide variety of hardware and there's no solution.

Turning off the MSAA seems to have helped a little but not completely. It's quite annoying, especially when it runs so well in every other way.

[Delboy]

Alan - got your PM and tried to reply but your inbox is full mate

[*alansx*]

Inbox now cleared.

[Delboy]

Well, last night I finally got around to overclocking the 3570k. Well, I say I did it, I found a nifty little tool in the Asus AI suite program that more or less did it all for me

Lazy and possibly less fun, but much simpler for inexperienced old me.

Up 24% to jusr over 4.3Ghz. No sign of undue temp increases yet, looks like the Noctua is handling it well. I think there is more to be had from it, I chose the mild option rather than the extreme one, will certainly do for now.

Was going to bench it again but it seems my 3d mark demo has now expired, so will need to see if I can find another one somewhere to see what difference has been made.