Joining the PC Master Race, part one
Every hero has an origin story:
In a suburb near the city, there lived a man. Not a dirty, disheveled, unkempt man, but not one given to extreme tidiness either. And in this suburb, this man owned, enjoyed, and cherished the plug and play simplicity of the Xbox ecosphere. He had never strayed too far into consoles as to get a PlayStation, as symbols and not letters on buttons scare him. Also, he did not want fear in his gaming, but joy, and so he stuck it out over generations of Xboxes. This Xbox, the One S, was a gift from his beloved wife, who at times asked if he had killed any pixelated monsters. He had. He most assuredly had shown those little bastards!
But a creep was in his heart. The screen’s blacks and colors were muddied or muted, blocky when great clarity was desired. And he despaired thinking about load screens. His heart yearned for isometric, turn-based roaming of fantastic worlds. Alas, his dearest Xbox could not provide such a joy. Sure, he could play Divinity: Original Sin with a controller and did, but it did not seem the same. The missing elements, he supposed, was the click-clack of the mechanical keyboard and the pit-pit clicking of a mouse racing around the screen. In tandem with key smashing commands to reign fire on this creature or that…
The last game I played and majorly enjoyed on my Xbox One S was Outer Worlds. What a fun game. Despite their reputation for sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying bugs, Obsidian as a game designer had never failed to create immensely enjoyable games, vivid worlds, characters worth following, and dialogue that crackled with wit, humor, or gravitas where needed. I played it solidly for a few weeks. I know a game is over for me when I rush through the main story quests. I’d say around the 65 marks if that game is not named Skyrim or Fallout 3, New Vegas, or Fallout 4. Those, among others such as Witcher 3, soared into the north of a hundred-hour mark. I know those are rookie numbers among genuinely dedicated gamers. Still, it is about the attention span I can give a game not named….you get the idea.
I discovered Assassin’s Creed through Origins, continued into Odyssey, where I learned I should not buy DLC. I never play DLC. Except for Skyrim or Fallout. Odyssey was a blast of a game, despite its heretic stance among AC diehards longing for linear missions and stealthy kills. I was glad to add another series of big, bloated, seemingly endless RPGs to my list of games to play as they rolled out. Add in Far Cry, Ubisoft had me hooked. They were not alone, but they at least had the decency to give me a yearly feeding of delicious ARPG goodness that my button mashing heart craved.
I played Outer Worlds via my Xbox Game Pass subscription. I have never met a subscription I didn’t sign up for, and the Game Pass is actually a smart idea. It would take me six months on the pass at 10 dollars a month to equal buying just Outer Worlds. Unlikely that would be my only game purchase. GamePass, ultimately, is not built for me. I do not find masses of retro Xbox games, odious JRPGs (a genre which I hate with a passion), or whatever other filler muck passes for games on the service enjoyable.
However, it did have a glimmer of hope. Playing the big 4x style strategy games took up residence in my mind, and I thought I would try them, tired out as I was by non-stop world-saving and monster-slaying in the RPG realm[1]. I bought Stellaris. Stellaris seemed to be the one least argued about as far as the quality of 4x empire builders goes. Gamers (at least the ones on r/gaming) don’t so much agree the most on something as disagree the least on something.
Away I went. Quickly the way back, I came. The Xbox interface was chunky to navigate. Xbox, due to button limitations, has to nest menus a complaint I had about playing D:OS on the system, with which I was not overly comfortable. Stellaris had the premise I was looking for: resources, combat, society building, all of it. It was Twilight Imperium[2] on a digital sandwich, awaiting its devouring. It stayed stale on the shelf of “My Apps and Games.”
Repeat all the above with Age of Wonders: Planetfall. By the description, this game was even more my apple butter jam! And it was on the Game Pass. Holy crap, two GP games; this investment was paying off. Same problem. It didn’t match the control scheme the Xbox was designed for. Dejected, I carried on.
The catalyst for my still ongoing dive into the Abyss of joining the PCMR, including joining the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, was the occasional ads I would get from the employee perks program from my wife’s company. They want to sell me a computer for up to 50% less than retail! Hell yeah! I looked over at my sad XPS 2013 tower.
“It may be your time, old girl.”
She flickered in sorrow.
In earnest, I began my look at computers. I know a little about the surface world of computers. I don’t program, I can’t code; those may even be two words that mean the same thing. I couldn’t tell you. I can fix a weird problem or two. I never have a better time than when an esoteric error message belays what I thought I would do with my weekend, instead sending me race car driving through Google searches and forums for fifteen solutions that never work and the one that always does: wipe and reload.
I had difficulties to resolve: once my spouse switched me from the Android wasteland to the shining city on a hill known as Apple products, I was hooked. I wanted one of everything. I wanted to type my blog on my MacBook while doing MacBook things on my MacBook. Until I saw the prices, and wondered if the ghoul of Steve Jobs comes to each house personally and gives several private tutorials on how to optimize MacOS features. Apple’s one appeal works on people like me, though they did not sell their products this way: they are stupid simple to use. Intuitive to a fault, most of the time. My life with Android could not compare. Also, much to my dismay, gaming in the Mac-o-sphere can be…challenging? Words like boot camp, eGPU, the frequency of the phrase “Catalina doesn’t support” the games I wanted to play floated about my mental word cloud. Also, the price tag. Did I mention the price tag? Now is a good time to tell you I have never used a Mac product in my life. I just knew I had to have one. But not for gaming. Could I convince the real power in my home that duh, of course, I need a Mac and a gaming rig? Don’t wait until the end. The answer is a definitive no.
Problem two: tower or laptop. Reader, if you want to ignite a war, ask this question on a forum:
“Hey gang, should I get a gaming laptop?”
Around 30% will say yes and honestly dissertate the pros and cons.
The rest will call your mother some very unfortunate names, ask why you aren’t building a custom PC, explain why laptops aren’t even real computers, and so on. It’s quite a sight to behold. Sometimes I still post the question when I’m feeling up on myself and need to be kicked around some.
I was quickly in the laptop camp. Portability was king. I wanted to be where my family was, but also ignore them while doing gaming on my laptop. We travel frequently and often idle away visiting hours chatting and busying our hands with other things. My wife is an avid iPad user, I did not have one. I had my hands and the ability to twiddle the thumbs on them.
Having settled on a laptop, I now had to work through understanding so much I never knew. I mean the basics. What CPU is right for gaming. Power is not everything. Don’t buy the one that says I7 or I9 just because. And what is a GPU anyway? Thermals? I didn’t ask for a physics lesson, I want to play games, dammit! The CPU question was easy as most laptops I liked aesthetically and that was built for gaming used an I7 or I9. Thus negating the need to consume worry mana about that. This was just before Ryzen hysteria.
Thermals. This one was actually easy. Gaming laptops get hot. Like, really hot. So hot, they can make you sweat if you set them on your legs. Often, they come with a dual GPU solution as a heat control. Dedicated graphics for everything and discrete graphics for the power stuff. Like massacring aliens or lockpicking that chest in that cave you put a marker on back when you were too low level to pick it. F**k you, lockpicking skill.
Every major manufacturer of gaming laptops has some wham-bam thermal solution that will totally solve the problem. They never do, as intelligent as most of those systems of heat distribution are. And they are clever, well-engineered mostly, and sincere in their efforts to solve this issue. Often, as many many reviews across many many laptops ultimately told me, was “a very loud fan when at full speed which happens as soon as you turn on a game.” To paraphrase most every review I’ve read. Having watched some YouTube test runs of these laptops in my quest for portable gaming power, some are quiet, some are as loud as Grandma’s 1960s Hoover vacuum. Thermals will require the sacrifice of silence and a quality laptop cooling pad.
Now, to the reason we all exist: the mighty graphics processing unit. To game, this is your number one consideration. Number two is probably the screen, but I got lost in the sauce on that, and just default clicked 144hz as it seemed to be the de jour thing to have screen-wise. This is where it ripped wide open for me. What in Satan’s name was all this?
Eons ago, I put a 780ti in my XPS tower to medium settings play Skyrim (again) and The Witcher 3. But in 2019, the 780ti had about all the digital wagon pulling power of a three-legged donkey walking backward. There is a 10 series, a 16 series, a 20 series. And that’s just Nvidia. AMD went with a three-digit system just but also it went with a four-digit system, except of course its two-digit system. Out of mental necessity, I would use a Nvidia card. This was before the AMD has finally done something right hype, or at least my awareness of it. I could manage three tiers of 4-digit classifications but not the Jackson Pollack level masterpiece of disorganization that was AMD’s graphics card organizational system.
Remember those Alpha nerds from earlier in this article? The ones who called my mom the unfortunate names? There is one question even more fight inducing than laptop/desktop.
Just ask, “Hey guys, what graphics card should I get?”
“Well, if it has to be a laptop…” and the arrogant smirk was evident across the electrical transmissions of the internet. Why did I seek advice on Reddit?
The answers were legion, including the recommendation of buying a Legion laptop, Lenovo’s offering in the gaming world. They are nice. Simple, not overly lit up. Clean design.
“Good laptop.”
“Total piece of garbage.”
We were getting places now.
Gamers and techies have as many opinions as there are opinions to have, none more so than the device upon which to play. Often, I wonder if the games even matter.
Through the grind of research, I knew I did not want a Dell, too much bloat though historically I had gone that way with my 2013 XPS and 2016 Inspiron laptop for college. HP Omen was out because it was HP, and I had some undefined bias against HP. Turns out, the Omen gaming line can make some decent stuff, but not to me, at the time. Alienware and lesser boutiques, your Digital Storms and Origin PC, were so staggeringly expensive that I swore those off immediately.
(But you will buy Apple products, said everyone else.)
I liked Lenovo Legion.
I liked ASUS Republic of Gamer stuff.
I had a soft spot in my heart for the over the top kitsch that was the laptops of Acer. And last I read about Acer, they were the makers of subpar junk machines. Now they made diesel gaming machines named Triton and Predator? Nice.
Over the first few weeks of November ’19, I spec’d out these machines hundreds of ways, seeing if I could manipulate the build cost somehow. I could not. Futureproofing seemed a good idea, given the limited updatability of laptops. Nvidia also was pimping a tech called Max-Q that shrunk the size of the graphics card down in the laptop to make them thinner and lighter.
The typical review of Max-Q went something like you might expect: “it sucks. Takes all the power away.”
Add in the stats from four dozen benchmarking sites provided by the Max-Q hater, and I was back to having night terrors over the Max-Q option.
Some kind forum and Discord souls were helpful.
“What do you want a laptop to do?”
“Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra!”
“Gonna need a 20 series for sure. What’s your budget?”
I took a quick glance at my paycheck as a Teacher’s Assistant at the local elementary school. My budget from that salary…0.
I took a quick glance at my wife’s monthly paystub: so many numbers and commas.
“I have an unlimited budget!” I declared triumphantly.
In my mind, my wife glared at me.
“I have a limited budget of sub 2k!”
That’s better, she smiled.
Substantially, the advice always narrowed down to get the most graphics card you can and then everything else for your budget. So, I did.
Lenovo Legion, it was. Sometimes it was an ASUS ROG Strix. Or an Acer.
For my birthday, my wife gave me a gift card of 400 dollars toward my goal. My mother in law contributed an additional 100.
I was on my way!
Less than a week of diligent saving later, I had no money left, but I did have a brand-new iPad Air, AirPods, Bluetooth keyboard, case, and a new Apple product. Somewhere in there, I gave a sincere speech to myself that I did not want a gaming laptop. Right?
[1] The lone RPG I played that does not address being an earth bashing mega god, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, got five hours out of me. I do not think I was fair to it, but such are my biases.
[2] Fantasy Flight Games’ famous 4X game, notorious for complexity and 8+ hour play times