Well there is so much to write about here. In this Covid crisis, gaming at home is on the rise. Most sites are reporting a 50% increase in traffic. Certainly it does seem like virtual reality might very well finally find its niche as people look for escape from their daily apartment life. So what are some things to do and what can you get:
Games to download
Well, in this shut in world, after you do your first few Zoom calls to your family and friends, the question is what you do next. You can only ask so often, “how are you?” or “talk about the depressing statistics”. So what are some solutions to this. The first is to play games:
- Houseparty is a great example. It is horrible with bandwidth, but the light games are really fun. Plus the way instant drop in is a really nice feature. It is so great to have a lightweight. In my own personal setup, I allocate my Macbook camera to house party and my main one to my trusty Logitech C920 that’s only HD, but that’s fine for internet use, it’s sadly basically unavailable now at Amazon as demand is out of this world. I really do wish I had my Logitech BRIO around which was a 4K monster, but this works. It’s normally $200 but unavailable now.
- Modern Warfare. Strangely when you are facing such a crisis, it’s great to just blow off some steam. (no pun intended). I’ve always been a Call of Duty fan from the very first version mainly for the single player mode because they try to be authentic. Their multiplayer stuff is a “run and gun” type that doesn’t seem real at all, but with their Battle Royale clone of Fortnite, they are back to something that is community based. That is, you play with two of your buddies and that let’s you blow off steam and hang out at the same time.
Building a Gaming Machine
Since you are probably at home, it’s not a bad time to build a computer for yourself. It’s a great hobby to pick up and really fun. In the last three months, I’ve worked on three different builds and they are all whip cracking fun. All my builds by the way are stored at PC Part Picker @richtong so if you want to see other builds they are all there:
- AMD Ryzen 3600X Minitower. For a modest $750, you can get a screaming machine that can play even the most advanced games at 1080p or HD. It won’t have the most advanced effects, but it is perfect for multiplayer games. The most important splurge is the use of a 1TB super fast PCI Express 4.0 drive and 16GB of memory. Windows boots in less than 15 seconds as a result.t
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X Minitower. Ok, this is a crazy machine, for a whopping $7.5K you get literally one of the fastest machines in the world in one of the smallest packages. It does need water cooling because CPU temperatures get to 75C with the best air cooler like the NH-U14S but with the Corsair, you are talking about 50C temperatures running at full overclock. This bear can run 32 cores at 4.1GHz without a problem. Then the dual RTX 2080Ti graphics cards run in NVidia Link mode is incorrect, you want the 3-slot spacing version. Sadly the PCI Express 4.0 2TB is now out of stock, so you can get the 1TB version.
- AMD Ryzer Threadripper 3970X Tower. If you don’t want it small, then you need a really big enclosure. This is nearly the same machine as the minitower, but you have room to add alot of drives. In this case, you can add up to eight 3.5″ hard drives and 4 5.25″ drives. So this machine is great for your server room. So you can run big background loads like Poker simulations :-). Note that you will need Windows 10 Server to use this as handling 256GB of memory, so that’s an additional expense I forgot to add.
