Lol my cables are so neat and my PC so beautiful now, no way I'm going back and doing it myself with my gorilla paws.

(turned myself off of building PCs when I did my own water cooled rig in my early 20s. Never again.)

 

I went with PC Specialist. I configured the same system (or as close as possible) on a number of reputable providers (Chillblast, Overclockers, Cyberpower, Box) and PC Specialist came out the cheapest. I also checked some online discussion and was satisfied that PC Specialist do good cable management as standard, whereas with a lot of makers you have to upgrade to a premium cable management option if you want the cables tucked away behind the mobo tray (often around £50, so not cheap).

They deliver to most of Europe but not to the US.

Link to my configuration, for those who enjoy playing around with specs: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z690-pc/t0mvY7xT6K/

 

Gaming PCs have never been affordable in Poland and covid and the recent inflation bullshit haven't helped. I have never owned an up-to-date gaming PC and I've rid myself of delusions that I ever will. I think my only hope is that there is a decent laptop model out there I might be able to afford one day that won't be crippled by the eternal flaw of laptops--dust accumulation and heating problems that come from that.

 

Update: switched my motherboard from the ASUS TUF GAMING B660-PLUS WIFI D4 to the ASUS TUF GAMING Z690-PLUS WIFI D4.

The Z690 board was only £15 extra and will mean I can get more out of the i5-12600KF. It will also give me more options to expand my M.2 storage down the line.

 

I did a thing.

 

Now whenever you post screenshots, ten people will go "how fucking wide is your screen???"

You don't need dual screens with that beast.

 

That was my logic. I was gonna get a regular UW but figured it'd look dumb with a second monitor.

So i just got the 49 inch Odyssey G9 Neo.

 

This feels like such a peasant question to ask... But is it much effort to get your windows resized when you open stuff up, or is there something that stops them taking the entire screen?

Some of the hissy-fits I had to deal with for Skyrim wanting to be full-screen on dual monitor had been vaguely painful.

 

For games, I set it once and it remembers, even windowed. I play Lost Ark at windowed 3440x1440 and it remembers to be centered on my screen, and even Brave remembers it was resized to fit on the sides.

I've not had any weird issues like that, though playing Cyberpunk a bit at the full resolution was... interesting.

 

After ages of only owning underpowered laptops and older generation consoles, I've finally bought a current gaming PC. It's a i5-12400 + RTX 3060 combo. Since I'm gonna be using a 1920x1080 monitor, this should be enough even for years to come.

I'm in Japan and building it myself just wasn't realistic for me, so I went with the "BTO" (built-to-order) option. I don't know how much freedom you have with BTO in other countries, but here you usually start with a prebuilt and are given limited options to change each component. Or none at all, sometimes.

A big issue I've faced is that many stores won't list the specific brand/model of GPU they'll give you. It's just "a RTX 3060" and I wasn't okay with that. I wanted to know what I'm getting. And then out of those with specific options, many asked for unreasonable extra prices just to allow you to to specify an MSI card etc. So I really had to look for a store that lists model details and only asks for reasonable prices.

Luckily I've found two of them, with one of them having a limited sale on the BTO base I was interested in. That clinched it for me, since I managed to end up in the lower bound of my budget even after sprucing up various options like a better CPU cooler etc.

The specific GPU I've got is this one: https://www.msi.com/Graphics-Card/GeForce-RTX-3060-VENTUS-2X-12G-OC
Turns out this is a sort of a budget model, since there's also a "gaming" version that's slightly bigger and has a sleeker design, with a more modern fan, but eh, I doubt it'll matter much for my purposes of playing Witcher 3 and such.

Turns out a gaming PC very much overtakes a PS4, for example. I've had one for a while and made a list of games I'm interested to play on it, which now got cut in half (from ~60 to ~30). Basically anything that's not an exclusive will be better on PC with higher FPS and mods. At the same time, there's still enough exclusives to make it worthwhile (P5R, 13S, GR1+2, GoT), so I'm keeping it. Probably wouldn't get much for it anyway.