Tag: pc

Excited for my new computer

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What is a recent purchase you are excited about?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

It’s been a fair few years since I built my gaming PC, and a couple since I upgraded the GPU. Thankfully, the GPU is still in a good competitive position for the current market, so I don’t feel the need to upgrade it again (because that would be expensive enough as it is.)

Thinking on how long it had been since I built my PC, and watching my roommate go through the motions of upgrading his, I decided to follow suit (the FOMO was real.) So, I ordered all new parts, including a case, and I started a ground up new PC build using the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D that hit the market almost two months ago.

I had ordered all the parts prior to my vacation, and got most of them before I even left, so I put together everything I could while I waited for the new SSD and the CPU itself. Both were on back order and I wasn’t expecting them to arrive before my trip, which meant I wasn’t going to be missing out on playing with it while I was gone. The SSD was supposed to arrive the day after I left, but it showed up the day before, so that was alright. I just installed it right away and went back to waiting for the last part. The CPU.

I wasn’t expecting the CPU to show up until mid-January, but for some reason it managed to ship early. I got the notification while I was gone and had to have my roommate keep an eye out for it. I’m still surprised that it showed up as early as it did, because I was also planning on cleaning and reorganizing my gaming and hobby desk setup when I got back. Unfortunately, in that area, I haven’t done that yet, which means I haven’t finished setting up the new PC. On the bright side, though, my roommate and I did install the CPU and made sure that everything worked after getting the OS installed (he had a heck of a time getting everything working when he did his build, which I’m grateful for because it meant I could tap into that knowledge if I ran into similar issues.)

So, now I’m just kind of taking my time to get caught up on my cleaning and then I can get to gaming again. Maybe I’ll even do a couple of streams in the near future!

Brand quality and recognition

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite brands and why?
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When we’re talking about brands it really depends on the category of product. More often than not, I don’t particularly care about specific brands. Generic products are usually just as good as their brand name counterpart. The only time I truly care about a brand pick is when you don’t have many choices, like with gaming.

Gaming hardware is an area that is limited to just a few companies in the home console market, and computer components are kind of in a similar situation. Looking at consoles, my favorite brand has pretty much always been Nintendo. They don’t aim for the latest and greatest or most cutting edge technology when designing their consoles, preferring to go with well developed and tested modern components that they can try to stretch the limitations of (if you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you understand.)

For the computer gaming side of things it really depends on a component level to understand the wider landscape of brands. Graphics cards are limited to just a couple of primary designers/manufacturers (AMD, Nvidia, and more recently Intel) with many subsidiary brands that help with the manufacturing (such as Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc.) while CPU’s are limited to just AMD and Intel. You could get really down in the weeds when looking into building a PC and trying to select components from various brands. As for a favorite brand in this area, I would most likely pick AMD and EVGA. AMD specifically for their increased product development strategies of the last decade because they were fighting to catch up with Intel in the CPU/GPU markets (and finally getting to a very competitive position against Intel, who kind of stagnated their own hardware development by being complacent in their dominant position.) EVGA has had exceptional quality customer service (in my limited experience) when it comes to their GPU’s and PSU’s, so I’ve stuck with them for that reason.

We’ll leave things here for now, though, because I could probably go on for ages about the many different brands I like and why.