Hardware Insights Forum

Hello everyone!

Until recently, I've only used off-the-shelf laptops for working and playing alike, and never really bothered to change whatever was in them.
But now that I'm going to have 1) a place of my own, a place I'm not going to move away from in a couple months or years and 2) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 with ridiculously high performances on the horizon, I've decided to try my hand at building a desktop PC that would be easier to update regularly than a laptop.
And of course, there's a problem... I don't know what to get. I know that bigger numbers = better, but apart from that... and that's why I joined this forum.

Thanks for keeping that forum alive and for the knowledge I can find on it!

To tell the truth, we haven't really stayed on top of things lately (our last game review was in 2018 and last HW reviews in 2017). Especially not me, I don't even like working on computers . (It's mainly the software side that bugs me; hardware I can tolerate somewhat more, especially PSUs which were the actual attraction to this site, but not enough to compensate for the software shambles.)

As for something I've actually done, you can view my mini-review thread which includes a range of items (some of which are Australia-specific models, but you can usually find similar elsewhere). Of particular note are the portable heaters, which I took on as a challenge after seeing how poorly certain "mainstream" publications (namely Choice magazine in Australia) understand them; it wasn't hard to do better. (I may or may not step up to "fully" reviewing them in the near future; at the moment, I don't have the space to keep more models myself, and my intended workaround of examining friends' units isn't off to a fast start. Anyhow they'll remain a side-project, not a career for me.)

I think the problem with "reviews" of such simple devices is that the people who would know enough to understand them properly are largely involved in the more sophisticated (and "glamorous") high-tech fields, leaving the low-tech ("boring") review sector to run on Dunning—Kruger.
If you want to dabble in that stuff yourself, I'm willing to assist in my spare time (of which I have plenty)…

It's that long already? Oh my

Well anyways, now is not really the best time for building a gaming rig if you don't actually need it soon (which I presume not, cause not that I watch it that much, but think the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is not coming for months at least, possibly longer?) anyways. HW prices, graphics especially, are ridiculous.

But welcome nonetheless, don't be afraid to start a thread if you feel for the discussion. Can't promise I'll get to it right away though, server's barely holding it together so notifications may be unreliable