The death of a not so powerful GAMING PC
I got my first PC(read for gaming) after i passed my 12th standard. At that time it was the most powerful PC to me(it was a PIII) with a whooping clock speed of 933MHz and 128MB of SDRAM,20GB of Hard Disk space,a CD-ROM and a combination of multimedia speakers,keyboard and mouse.
It was able to play those good looking games for me at perfectly normal settings(read no AA,AF,HDR etc etc..those words were too alien for me at that time)and i was pretty happy with those sluggish frame-rates(read below 60 fps).Little did i knew that time that frame rates mattered sooo much and good visual graphics at the highest possible setting is what people call eye-candy.
I had seen a E3 preview back then of Max Payne in an issue of Computer Gaming World(Indian Ed.). I was so impressed by the teaser video(this term being mainly and widely used now-a-days) that to me playing Max Payne would be like attaining nirvana. So my hunt began and after searching a lot i got hold of a copy of Max Payne. Completing it made me so ecstatic that every friend of mine how-so-ever interested in gaming would be hearing bout Max Payne from me.
But that did not stop me from knowing more about how to play better and with all eye-candy. The time had come for those bastard P4 to invade the life of this self proclaimed gamer. I was broken shattered by those clock speeds. Now-a-days it was the era of GHz and no one seemed to be interested in the plain old MHz processors.
Slowly (thanx to the marvellous invention called the Internet) i was able to fulfill my appetite for the Gen-NEXT PC hardware combination that would help me play those insane graphics and resource hungry games at S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G frame rates above 60. I had those dial-up connections and was proud to say that i had a Net connection at home(never mind the phone bills).
The hunt was finally over. I went to college. In my second year i got a PC (read second one – courtesy mom).I got what i thought would help my gaming needs. Coz with the money allocated and staying in a place like Allahabad, an AGP card (or VGA card or what-the-hell u wanna call those bastards) was really out of the question. So an on-board graphics solution is what i went for (read shared V-RAM architecture). Armed with a P4 1.7GHz monster,256MB of RAM and 40GB(man it was still a lot 3 ~ 4 years back!!) a CD-ROM, a CD-Writer and my dream an Optical mouse i started out gaming.
It was going all smooth till some god-damn game publishers came out with games which required more than 64MB of dedicated V-RAM(it was the Minimum System Requirements) on an AGP(PCI-E was still a long way to come then) card. Start pestering your parents is what i did. It landed me with a XFX(at that time known as Pine Technologies) 128 MB GeForce FX 5200 AGP 8x card. It was like heaven. But the sad part of the happy story was when i opened my cabinet only to find my motherboard did not have any AGP slot not even a 2x slot leave alone a 4x/8x slot. A little persuasion and my dealer changed my mobo without a hitch. It had a 4x slot and i was contended. All this time my previous PIII was like rotting in hell until my sis came forward to its rescue.
But the game-devil got the better out of me and woosh i upgraded to 512MB of DDR RAM. To me it felt like heaven. It was not until those devils at nVIDIA released the 6-Series cards with the introduction of PCI-E that i again started feeling that i was due for an upgrade. And man it was an upgrade. All of my PC got a face-lift except for the cabinet. Firstly bent my parents to get me a not-so top-of-the-line state-of-art motherboard but still one that i researched out and would be affordable. Next it was the turn of the AGP card. An XFX 6600GT with 256MB GDDR3 RAM and AGP 8x was what it took to make me contended. And lastly the RAM went up from the then paltry 512MB to 1536MB. The CD-ROM and CD-Writer gave way to DVD-Writer.
Contended with all those upgrades and having a blazing fast PC(according to me and compared to all my friends PCs) i was happy. But suddenly the PIII which had started all those fell on my eyes. Sitting neglected like anything at one corner of the house, i thought it was high time that i find it a new owner who would be willing to take care of it fully. Contended with the new owner i sold it. Good-bye my old friend. You have helped me go through a long journey and helped me learn a lot. That said it was the end of a not so powerful gaming rig(for me atleast) but the acquisition of a powerful PC by another.
But after all those upgrades i still seem to think my PC is still slow enough to run the latest eye-popping games . The game-devil inside me screams for a Dual Core CPU based SLI system and i know that it’s gonna cost me an arm and leg(and if i am not mistaken even a kidney,en eye maybe).
So if you people out there who have are still reading this shitty matter till now..go home..go to bed and forget about upgrading your good old PC if you are not a casual gamer(or deal with video encoding and recoding).Cause it will cost a lot to get that state-of-the-art PC even if assembled.
And if you are a hardcore game enthusiast then welcome abroad this mad journey where hardware tends to get old by the end of 6 months and you are left lurching in the dark about what to do next..
Go S-C-R-E-A-M your lungs out at those hardware manufacturers who churn out those high end products every now and then and seem to think that people have a hell lot of money to upgrade every now-and-then to keep themselves updated to play those latest block- busters(read Far Cry, Half Life 2 ,Doom 3, F.E.A.R etc to name a few) with all the eye-candy cranked upto maximum and at S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G frame rates of 60 fps(read minimum) and above.
And lastly a thought for you : Do you rea
lly need a Dual Core Processor and a SLI system with more than a Gig of RAM to run word processor and simultaneously play Winamp??
Just give it a thought if u still have time and feel like doing this after reading this shitty stuff.
Ha.. ha.. I still remember how we searched the Indira Bhawan computer stores… and no one did have what you were looking for..
Good days…