Gaming: Looks like it is time to bite the bullet

While I was able to get the new GPU card to work, it really is kludgey and likely to lead to a catastrophic failure. So I am building a new gaming rig. This is a look back to my past experiences

Nota bene: This is going to get geeky, so if detailed discussion of computer hardware isn’t your bag, feel free to click away. I will not be disappointed.

The good news is that the custom case and the GPU arrived. And I was mostly able to get it together and it does fire up. I got it to load a few games, and the gameplay is WAY better. Like phenomenally better.

But I lost a couple of things that really matter. The new case doesn’t have antennae for either WiFi or Bluetooth. I can live without the WiFi, as I plug into an ethernet cable and life is good. But no BT? That is no bueno.

Sure, I could look for an antenna (no, the one in the original case wouldn’t work), but that leads to the much more serious issue.

The top exhaust fans connect to the NUC unit, and the connector is – for want of a better term – just shit. It didn’t plug in easily, and as I assembled it (over and over) it would unseat, and thus the top fans never power up.

This is bad. Really bad. Like Chernobyl or Fukushima bad. Hardware doesn’t like not being cooled, and while the unit is smart enough to throttle down to avoid silicon destroying heat, that means that its configuration is useless for any serious gaming.

Boo.

I guess my three year old NUC is going to need to be retired.

(The last straw was that the built in power supply is on the edge of being able to drive the graphics card. That would certainly lead to problems later on)

Thus, I commenced the process of buying the components to build a proper gaming rig.

History

From the late 1980’s through the early 2000’s I built many PC’s. At least every other year, if not annually, the performance envelope shifted so much that if you wanted to play games, you had to constantly upgrade components, and that often meant that you needed a new motherboard, CPU and graphics card. In this time we went from ISA bus, to EISA, to AGP (special format for graphics cards), then PCI. At each step there were new chipsets¹ and CPU’s to power the next generation.

And make no mistake about it, PC gaming has driven a LOT of innovation over the decades since the 1990’s.

When I first started, the internet didn’t exist. We had BBS’s, and shared a lot of programs (cough - this was not legal, but it was common).

Physical media was the norm, and I believe my first install of Windows 95 took 17 floppy disks. Yes, it sucked big tool to install the OS by swapping in 3.5” floppies, a whole stack of them. But once the hardware was complete, the excitement of loading the OS, and getting that first boot was off the charts. And it often happened in the wee hours of the morning (after building, you just dove into the installation).

This got better, with Windows 98 the ability to boot from a CD-ROM became possible, then with Windows 2000, a really solid kernel was employed (it borrowed it from the Windows NT line) and Windows finally became fairly reliable².

The real game changer was Windows XP, that married a “Fisher Price” UI to a solid kernel and some questionable security³ that made it the prime go to for gamers. It has just enough robustness, and it worked with – well – everything.

Sure, it still locked up fairly often, but it was the bomb otherwise.

It was about this time that I drifted away from PC gaming, switching to the Xbox 360. The last PC I built to game had an AMD Athlon CPU, and I can’t remember what else. When I moved to Tucson in 2003, I sold it to a fellow LAN gamer and he was happy with it for a couple of years.

That is the back story.

How we sourced and built in the 90’s

In the early Internet era, there was a lot of information appearing online, and because I was building so often, I looked there, but also I read magazines to keep abreast of the latest developments. I also did a lot of shopping at the local Fry’s Electronics, and there were a couple of other stores here in Silicon Valley that catered to the hobbyist⁴. Most of the purchases were for items on the shelf, and we could go home and assemble/install/configure and play immediately. It was very gratifying.

In the late 1990’s a site went online called “Price Watch⁵” that would aggregate the lowest prices, and that led us to get away from the Fry’s/NCA/small mom & pop shops, and to use e-commerce to buy our goodies. This killed some of the smaller shops (NCA virtually disappeared) and Amazon hadn’t yet become the tech/e-tail juggernaut that it is today.

Also, we put all the emphasis on the components, and cheaped out on things like cases. I build so many beige boxes that were made with stamped steel, razor sharp edges, and really ugly cable/drive management.

A typical beige box case. Ugly, ain’t it?

All to chase the next tier of performance.

And it was fun. I do not regret this era. I always had plenty of last generation hardware, so when I wanted to play with the then-new Linux OS, I did. If I wanted to build a server to host our local LAN party Quake games, I did. A lot of gear had second and third acts before finally being sent to the scrap bin.

The real point of this post

Looking back, this is a huge preamble to my upgrade that I am going to undertake.

Almost 3 years ago, Covid was raging, I was in lockdown, working from home 100% of the time (and I still am at home 4 days a week, I go in one, but not every week) and I wanted to get into PC gaming again. I didn’t have unlimited desk space, so I looked at the high end Intel NUC’s and they could take a GPU (albeit a small form factor that limits options) and I plunged. It wasn’t cheap, but it was solid, and frankly Intel’s hardware engineers did a masterful job of designing this little monster. The one I have is a Ghost Canyon, with the Core i9 processor, 32G ram, 2 TB of SSD storage, and I added an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super graphics card⁶.

And this worked well. Especially for my nostalgia games.

Today though, I am desirous to get back to some new titles. Last week I installed the Starfield game, and while it plays, it was at all the lowest settings, and the poor GPU was pegged even at the worst settings.

In a few weeks the new Forza Motorsport drops, and I already know that my system is below the minimum system specs.

I bought a new GPU (that was the bottleneck) and a larger case to house it. Yesterday I swapped it over, but as I mentioned there were problems.

Alas, I need to build something from scratch for this. My 4 generation old Intel processor is a limiting factor.

Time to source and build. Sure, I could buy a premade system, but as I looked into them, they all have tradeoffs that I wouldn’t make.

This morning, I began the process to assemble the rest of the system to wrap around my groovy new GPU card.

Stay tuned!

1. The Chipset is the supporting components that provide things like IO, disk controllers, memory controllers, and the like. Terms like northbridge, southbridge and others became part of the lexicon. You do not need to understand this other than to know that as CPU’s and the goodies around them became more advanced, these technologies became embedded.

2. I should note that in the 95/98 era the standard joke was the BSOD or blue screen of death, what Windows flashed on the screen when it got borked. It happened A LOT, especially if you were pushing the boundaries of the performance, and we all did.

3. In the balance between security and performance, security and stability were sacrificed for performance and user delight. In the years after this, as the internet blew up, and the bad actors invaded the theater, the follow on OS’s to XP began to take security far more seriously. Alas, that broke a lot of things, and Windows Vista got a bad rap because a lot of the hardware makers went cheap on the security aspects, and that led to a lot of anguish by users, and a bad experience.

4. One of them was a company called NCA, and they would price match with Fry’s, so us in the know would bounce back and forth to get the best deals. But they also often sold dodgy gear. The only motherboard I ever bought that had the “fake” cache chips was a 486DX2 motherboard from them. I am still pissed about that.

5. The address was http://pricewatch.com, alas it is now defunct)

6. The GTX 1660 was dated when I bought it, but the RTX2060 was unobtainable at any price, and if you did find one, you could expect to lighten your wallet by upwards of $2,200 (for a card with an MSRP of $350) due to the insanity of Crypto currency mining. What fucking assholes the miners were, and Nvidia for stuffing the channel with the miners, leaving us hobbyists to deal with scalpers. ‘nuff said.

---