Posts in Category: pc gaming

Building a Compact Gaming PC with the i5-12600K

After spending the last several generations playing it safe and letting AMD enjoy the CPU spotlight, Intel finally decided to provide a more robust competition with their recent 12th-generation Alder Lake chips. New DDR5 RAM support, much smaller lithography, and lots more cores await to provide plenty of gaming and multitasking performance this holiday season.

Today, we’ll be looking at a build including the i5-12600K that focuses on being compact yet powerful—capable of fitting in a tight space, or moving with relative ease from house to office (or from home office to entertainment room). As we’ll see, the i5-12600K is a multitasking master for a great price, so this will be a gaming-workstation hybrid in a nice tight package.

Before we begin, let’s explore the 12600K in a bit more depth so we know what we’re working with!

Read More

Building a Quiet Gaming PC with the Intel i7-12700K

 

With Intel releasing their new 12th-generation chips into a market still saturated with scalpers peddling $2000 GPUs, it’s fair to say that most people interested in this new hardware are looking to upgrade just their CPU (and motherboard) rather than putting together an entirely new build.

But it’s a lot easier to conceptualize what to upgrade when you see how the part fits into an entire build. And maybe some wild people out there are looking to build an entirely new PC regardless of the difficulties. For those reason, the ongoing graphics card woes won’t stop us from having a little fun and planning a handful of creative builds with Intel’s Alder Lake series of CPUs! For this specific build, we’ll be looking to make a quiet PC capable of letting you game in peace (without it sounding like a passenger jet is preparing for takeoff right on your desk).

First, let’s take a close look at the star of the PC: the i7-12700K!

Read More

Steam Deck Specifications – Comparing Valve’s Deck to PC Gaming Hardware

Steam Deck Performance

Valve has released the Steam Deck specifications, and they have spawned a storm of excitement. Essentially, the Steam Deck is a handheld gaming PC built around SteamOS. The Steam Deck is poised to be a fairly unique product, looking like a hybrid of a handheld console like the Switch and a conventional desktop PC (like the ones found in our main chart). Indeed, Valve’s Deck is being marketed as a “Gaming PC” with the intention of providing all the features that framing entails, for everyone from tech enthusiasts to gamers.

It’ll have a native SteamOS interface with (mostly) complete support for your pre-existing Steam library (limited to games that have either been ported to Linux or which can be run with Proton and Steam Play), and it’ll also have the ability to replace SteamOS with another option, such as Windows, in order to run just about any other title you can think of.

The Steam Deck specifications and features allow you to run anything and everything on it—and its the combination of that openness; controls including a touchscreen, capacitive pads, and back-grip buttons; the ability to ‘dock’ it to play on a TV or monitor; and a priority placed on ergonomics that (altogether) makes the device more interesting than something like a Nintendo Switch or a GPD Win3. There are just so many features all at once!

As for the hardware itself, Valve has released a very comprehensive spec sheet on the Steam Deck website. We’ll know exactly how this hardware will perform in games once the first units make it into the hands of reviewers, but until then we can take a close look at the provided specs and discuss how they stack up against current desktop hardware!

Read More

The Steam Deck vs Valve’s Top 10 Games

 

How well does Valve’s new Steam Deck hold up against Steam’s own library?

The announcement of the Steam Deck in July 2021 introduced Valve’s latest excursion into the complex world of gaming hardware. No doubt inspired by Nintendo’s success with the Switch console, the Steam Deck aims to let you take your entire Steam library wherever you go. Well, most of your library, anyway (more on that soon enough). But how will the Steam Deck handle Steam’s current most popular games? Will they run like a well-oiled machine, or break down faster than a 3DS running Crysis?

Let’s look at Steam’s current top 10 games on Steam Charts, and do a little predicting! We’ll be looking at the 10 Steam games with the highest player counts in August 2021.

Read More

The 5 Best Gaming Laptops in 2021

After the past year, it really is a different world out there. So it should come as no surprise that the old, time-tested PC Shopping Wisdom doesn’t really apply today like it did even a few years ago. Gaming laptops? A good deal? Arguably, yes, they are now. Lack of component availability due to chip shortages, scalping, cryptocurrency mining, and more has made building a capable desktop PC for a reasonable price (or at all) close-to-impossible.

There are also, however, the inherent benefits of laptops: portability, peripherals being included with the part purchase, smaller form factor, and the device coming fully pre-assembled. These are just a handful of the most prominent areas where laptops have always come out on top.

Read More

Top 5 Prebuilt Computers for Gaming in 2021

With the GPU shortages continuing, some people are turning to prebuilt computers. These are pre-assembled PCs, usually sold at a slightly elevated price over buying the parts separately; thus, building your system yourself would normally be cheaper. However, prebuilt prices have generally not increased as much as GPU prices have, and because of that prebuilt PCs are suddenly an interesting option.

And even in situations where the prices of these pre-made computers have kept pace with the rest of the market, they are sometimes nevertheless one of the few reliable ways to obtain certain GPU models that are frequently out-of-stock when sought directly. So, as wild as it may seem coming from this particular website, in this article I will discuss 5 prebuilt computers that are currently worth the money (1 budget choice, 3 midrange choices, and 1 premium choice).

Read More

10 Recommended Mechanical Keyboards for 2021

As the primary point of physical contact between you and your desktop, your keyboard can make or break your PC gaming experience. With different form factors, switch types, and extra features, it can be difficult to find the right one for you.

This list briefly looks at ten recommended mechanical gaming keyboards in five categories for satisfying a variety of wants and needs, after ruling out options that are out-of-stock as well as options that are only available through group buys, preorders, and other limited stock methods.

Let’s begin!

Read More

Building a Gaming PC with the i7-11700K

Intel recently launched a new lineup of chips, and one of them was the i7-11700K, an 8 core/16 threaded powerhouse with a boost clock of 5 GHz. With such specifications, this processor runs any game smoothly. As a result of the high core count, it would also be fit for workstation purposes such as video rendering.

It does have a noticeably high TDP: 125 Watts! This already tells us the processor might get a little hot under high loads. Nevertheless, the performance is astounding and makes up (slightly) for the high TDP.

In this article, we’ll be building using the new i7 to build a PC for high-tier gaming. Let’s dig in:

Read More

A Quick Rundown on Starlink: Is it Ready for PC Gaming?

Imagine for a moment: High-speed, low-ping internet costing the same or less than the lowest-tier options provided by your current ISP, regardless of your location. Sounds like an impossible dream, doesn’t it? Must we forever be stuck with a ping of 400 ms? Must the frugal among us always face download speeds that require waiting days before being able to play a newly bought game?

Well, that dream may become a reality in the not-too-distant future, as high speeds, low ping, and reasonable costs are the attributes promised by the upcoming ‘alternative’ internet service Starlink. But what exactly is promised, and does it seem likely that it can live up to its own hype?

Read More