My New Gaming PC

My gaming PC arrived about a week after I ordered it. Setup was quick and easy, with Windows 11 being easy to get used to. My games were set up within a couple days and most utilities, except for one particularly annoying one, were setup as well. The case is ever-so-slightly wider than my previous PC but it’s also ever-so-slightly less tall (and flat), leaving more room to store my headphones. I like the RGB fans in the front and don’t miss the DVD drive I didn’t use anyway. Overall it’s exactly what I was looking for.

As expected for a current generation system with a current generation mid-high range GPU, it runs my games well. I can now play games at 4K high or ultra settings at 60 fps or above. I did a quick comparison test on Callisto Protocol, which was incredibly taxing on my previous setup. At the same 1440p settings I’ve gone from 30 – 60 fps and frequent hiccups to 80 – 120 fps with no hiccups at all. That’s pretty good.

Below are some other miscellaneous notes:

• The one piece of software I had issues with is Armory Crate, the Asus software that controls overclocking, fans, and lighting. It’s absolutely terrible. I opened it to control my RGB fan lights and it immediately required an update that failed. After trying the update again multiple times I had to download and run the Armory Crate uninstaller, which also failed. Several reboots and reinstalls later left it totally broken, with the recommendation from Asus being to reinstall Windows. This left me with fans always running on high and no way to control the lighting. I found Signal RGB, a free app that can control not only my fan colors, but also sync them with my keyboard, RAM, and CPU cooler. It fixed my lighting issue; my fans will have to wait until another day.
• I enjoyed Dead Space Remake so much that I decided to play the original Dead Space 2 (since there is no remake, yet). It’s a game from 2011 so it’s not taxing, but I was surprised to find that it didn’t run on my new system. After some digging I found the issue: I have too many cores. Dead Space 2 can only run with a maximum of 10 cores; I have 20. There is a mod to fix the issue, but it causes annoying shadow flickering, leaving my only option to disable 8 of my efficiency cores in my BIOS. It’s a terrible solution, but it isn’t a big deal since my games don’t max out my CPU anyway. I’ll turn the other cores back on once Dead Space 2 is over.
• I finally bought Jedi Survivor and wow. It had tons of issues and abysmal performance on PC when it was released in April so I’ve been avoiding it. Seven large patches and a current generation GPU later, plus a holiday sale, and I finally bought it. With all settings at max (minus ray tracing) and DLSS + frame generation enabled, I can get 90 fps at 4K! It’s a beautiful game that’s tons of fun!
• Welcome to Windows – I rarely have to restart my Mac, but I felt like I was constantly restarting my PC after installing software and sometimes just because. I’ve run into issues with a million versions of Microsoft C++ Redistributable installed, to the point that I have to cancel the setup process in Task Manager to start Wolfenstien New Order.

Overall, my new PC is exactly what I wanted it to be. Hopefully I’ll get eight years out of this one too.