Re: Strategy on the Decline

On 5/25/2024 4:28 PM, Lane Larson wrote:

It's a horror story.  Say I come up with $3200 to buy the top end Alienware.  I bet I'd still have to deal with lots of overheating.  What I'd like to do is break my computer over someone's head and get in the news, where it says that my computer was too hot and drove me mad.  I was appalled when I got this one home and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was used to fry an egg.  When is this shit going to stop?  I bought too many computers in the 90s just to keep up.  My parents lost some faith in me when I liquidated my stock portfolio to buy just another computer.  And it's still happening!

Don't buy pre-made gaming computers.  You end up paying 2x (or 3x if you're talking $3200!) what you would for a better optimized system with cooling that works.  I didn't even try that hard, I probably spent a bit over $1000 for my current one which is a year old, and that's only because I bought a video card very close to their highest overpriced value.  I haven't had any problems playing anything and no issues with overheating.  All I did for cooling was bought a $32 tower fan and a case (years ago) big enough to fit it in.
If you don't want to assemble the computer yourself I believe many places will do so for a much smaller $ than buying from Alienware. I and others here, and other sites like tomshardware will be more than happy to help figure out a decent setup.
You can also put some blame on the programmers, Baldur's Gate 3 is the only thing that's really put any stress on my computer, it's all on the CPU and it's because it was very badly optimized at release, which I understand has been subsequently fixed, but I haven't returned to try it out again yet.  I don't play at high resolutions though, 1920x1024 for me, and have a dynamic refresh rate monitor.
CPUs have been hit harder in recent years as games have been optimized for consoles, which typically have different architecture for that and it doesn't work well when moved to PC.
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-Justisaur
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