Witty Name Here said:
ScrabbitRabbit said:
I became a PC gamer partly because it was cheaper just to get a computer that could game than it was to get a computer AND a console. This was pre-built, too, I was too naive to believe that building one is relatively easy and can save you a fairly substantial amount of money. And you don't have to upgrade anywhere near that much, games haven't gotten all that much more demanding in several years. My PC is relatively recent but several people I know are still using machines from five years ago.
Just because new components are released frequently doesn't mean we need to buy them all.
...No offense, but I don't really think "Cheap" or "Easy" should be used in the same sentence as "Build your own gaming computer".
Hell, if I were to "build my own computer", just looking at the recommended requirements for Battlefield 3 (not minimum, recommended) if I were to build the computer that it recommends I would have to fork over about
Quad Core Intel 2 - $139 on Amazon.com (Then again, just saying "Quad Core Intel" is so vague that I'm not even sure if
that's the right one most of them have seemingly unimportant random numbers or letters after them. How am I supposed to know what "LGA 1155" even means?)
RAM - (How am I supposed to know what 4 GB of RAM even costs?)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 - $130 on Amazon (though I have no clue whether this graphics card can play other games or whether it's even superior to the other graphics cards it mentions... Or whether it even has a single GB of RAM on it)
Direct X Sound Card - $50 on Amazon (Once more, I have
no way of knowing whether this would work with the other stuff or if it's even good beyond the User Reviews)
So far it's in the $310 dollar range, and that's not counting the monitor, the modem, the keyboard and mouse or... Well, anything else I would inevitably need to build the thing.
Continuing with the Car motif someone mentioned: I know dick all about cars, you put petrol in them and they go, and occasionally put oil and water in them so you don't fuck up the engine. Know what I did when I was buying my first car? I asked some people, I researched stuff on the internet, and I had someone who knew what they were talking about help me when I went to look for cars.
Okay so that's what, £200? £350 if you throw in the Monitor, PSU and Hard drive that you left out. Granted it's not as easy as going out and just buying a console, but that PC would last you for AAAAGES. You do not need to upgrade every two years, you will have seen this after spending any amount of time on the internet, it annoys the hell out of me that people STILL seem to think it costs thousands of pounds and yearly upgrades for a gaming PC to function.
Battlefield 3 is one of the most resource hungry games out there, if you can run that, you can run anything else you want, and it would likely last you well into the next console generation,(Especially if you're building a PC based around BF3, it'll be more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox 720, I'll tell you that for a start) the Xbox 360 and PS3 are still the same consoles they were when they came out,(The xbox 360 came out in 2005 by the way, and the hardware in it was pretty pants then) and they run modern games okay, (granted BF3 was toned down for the consoles, but then the hardware in consoles is pretty pants). Graphics have reached a grinding halt at the moment, I haven't looked at a game and gone "WOW! Look at the graphics!" in years, (not GRAPHICS and not Aesthetics), even that tech demo Square released recently wasn't a massive jump from say... anything this generation. That and it was pre rendered, so it doesn't make anything.
Just because you're too lazy to do any research that would take about 5 minutes on this amazing site called Google (don't tell anyone, it's our secret, kay?) that doesn't make it some impossible task. You ALREADY have a Modem/Router, because we're having this conversation. On the INTERNET. So that's out of the way. You want a mouse and keyboard? Go to Tesco and pick up both for a tenner. You don't need a flashy mouse and keyboard, so long as they work.
RAM: How do you find out how much 4gb of ram costs you ask? Well you look for ram and add the price up. Easy. Why on earth is that so difficult?
GcardThe NVidia GTX 560 has 1GB of VRAM on it. Know how I know that? I googled the name of the card, and it was on the first page.
Sound card? Don't need one of those, never have, and neither will you unless you're an audiophile or record music.
CPU Buy a CPU and motherboard combo, there done. You know the CPU'll fit the motherboard and you're done.
You want a case? That's going to be 10-20 quid unless you feel it necessary to buy a case with flashy lites and gizmos.
Okay, your grandma isn't going to do be able to do it, but I'm going to assume you're at least a little computer literate, or you wouldn't even be on this site, just use your brain and google stuff that you don't understand, I myself figured out how to build a PC when I was 15, it's not exactly brain surgery. In the event that you're not sure, write down the specs and post em to a site to run it by people who've done it before. Or if you're really lazy, just copy the specs for a pre built PC and buy the components yourself.
SO there we go. PC for $530, $600 tops, that'll last you for fucking ages because you decided to base it around Battlefield 3. PS3s seem to run for about $300 from what I can tell, while the games are at least $70 a pop (or at least on a straight conversion, console games are £45 in the UK). PC games in comparison are $45. So you make up for your extra spending by not only having cheaper games, meaning it eventually pays for itself, (that's ignoring Steam sales, where I just got Saints Row 3 for £7, which still retails at £40 in the stores) but also a device that can do lots of other stuff besides play games. Done.
It would take me longer to recite that, than it would for you to do the research it requires to make your own PC. Building it is pretty easy to, if it doesn't look like it fits, it wont. They're all colour/size coded these days too, so if you put something where it isn't supposed to go, it's your own stupid fault.
EDIT: After reading what developed in this thread in the time it took me to type that out, it turns out that 530-600 figure I pulled out of the air was actually bang on the money. Go me!
On the actual OP: Yeah, it's nice to see the kickstarter people are excited about it, but I don't think that it'll actually cause a dent in anyones sales. All it would take is for MS and Sony to start letting people stick up indy games and BAM! No more Ouji-wotsit. No one wants or needs a "console" that only plays phone games, they have a phone for that. Granted the existance of the OUYA could be the kick in the pants MS and Sony need to start supporting indie developers, which would be great, but it would come at the cost of the OUYA launching into a bed of flames and sacrificing itself for the greater good.
