Finally Got a New PC

[Gerowen]

So I finally broke down and got myself a new PC.  I had thought and thought about swapping parts in and out of the desktop I've been using for ages to upgrade it, and even went ahead and upgraded its power supply (may downgrade it again so it uses less juice); and the more I thought about it, the more I considered just buying a pre-built PC, and making it a laptop so I can take it to another room, on a trip, etc..  My old laptop had ran great for ages; I played through Half Life 2 on it for the first time ever, and there was something about being able to fold up your entire PC, stick it in a bag, take it with you, and have a full blown PC experience on the go.  I like "mobile", but I really prefer a full PC experience.  I might want to play a game, work on a friend's computer, or any number of things, and there's just certain advantages to having a full blown PC with a large display.  The old desktop has been relegated to a dedicated file server and moved in there and connected directly to the router.

 

I wasn't going to be terribly picky, but I wanted the best machine I could walk into a local store and buy.  I went to the local Wal-Mart and got their 17 inch HP Pavilion.  It's got 8 GB of RAM (will probably upgrade this later to 12 or 16 GB), a 17.3 inch display and a full size keyboard.  The processor/graphics are an AMD APU, and best I can understand it's a quad core with 6 more cores that act as a GPU on the same chip.  Speccy says "AMD A10-8700P Radeon R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G".

 

My goal was to get a reasonable upgrade from my old dual core desktop with integrated graphics (256 MB video RAM).  I tested it first with Half Life 2.  On my old laptop I could play it at 900p with the settings somewhere between low and medium; no antistropic filtering or anything like that.  On this new one I cranked everything as high as it would go and it holds between 60 and 80 fps when set to the built-in screen's native resolution of 1600x900.

 

I know it's nowhere NEAR being a high end PC, it might not even be considered "middle of the road", particularly since it's a laptop, but for me, the thought of being able to play the new DOOM (I fall somewhere between the minimum and recommended specs according to the Steam page) on a PC is just unreal, and the $400 price tag put it right in the same price range as a new game console.

 

My biggest thing is getting used to Windows 10.  The last time I used Windows extensively was Windows 7; most of my personal machines have been exclusively Linux distros for ages so even my Windows 7 experience was 99% work related, so I'm really used to getting things done in Debian or Ubuntu Linux, and really used to how snappy and responsive those interfaces feel.  I caught myself mousing into the top left corner out of habit a while ago to try and pan all my windows out so I could find a specific program that was running, but I'm sure I'll get used to this.  I would install Linux on this, and I still might, but part of my reason for buying it was to be able to play PC games that aren't 20 years old, and although about 80% of the games I have in Steam have Linux versions available from Steam, there's still that 20% that don't.

Windows 10 seems straight forward enough, but there are some slight differences like the whole "Windows Store" thing and the questions at the beginning asking to share all sorts of information.  Most of it seemed pretty harmless, but it's just a new experience for me.  One of the first things I did was take a Clonezilla image of the hard drive as a whole and stick it on my server before I ever booted Windows for the first time, so I have the option of returning it to a "New In Box" state if anything ever happens.

 

If anybody is on Steam my username is "Gerowen", the same as everything else (except XBL, somebody stole that name and then never used it so I'm Gerowin on there).  I'm gonna have to do some Googling to find out how this laptop stacks up to my PS4 or my wife's Wii U.

[Circaflex]

33 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

and even went ahead and upgraded its power supply (may downgrade it again so it uses less juice)

It wont make a difference. It is all about how much power your computer actually uses.

 

33 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

I tested it first with Half Life 2.

Excellent choice of game to test with. Sounds like you got a nice little machine that will work for you.

 

[Gerowen]

1 hour ago, Circaflex said:

It wont make a difference. It is all about how much power your computer actually uses.

 

Excellent choice of game to test with. Sounds like you got a nice little machine that will work for you.

 

I know I won't have the highest resolutions or framerates, but my goal was to have something that would at least come close to my PS4 for playing PC games on the go with.  There's a handful of old PS3 games I would love to play at higher resolutions and framerates, namely Skyrim and "Dragon Age: Origins".  I had DA: Origins on XBox 360 and the textures looked really washed out; and although the textures looked better on the PS3, the PS3 version suffered from lag spikes.  I remember a time or two when I'd have a full party and a large group of mobs all on screen fighting, the game would literally just freeze for 2-3 seconds.  I'm hoping to get around issues like that in the future by broadening my available platforms to include PC so that if the better experience for a game is on PC, I can play it.