A reader explains why he was finally convinced to buy a gaming PC, and the easiest way to research and build your own.
It’s a daunting feat moving console, you lose all your saves, your Achievements/Trophies and have to redo everything all over again from scratch. Being a terrible completionist like me it’s an absolute nightmare. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been my go-to game since its release way back In May of 2015, and getting 100% in that consumed my life for a good few weeks. I got bought my first PlayStation since the good old days of the PlayStation 2, I had a shiny new console – the PlayStation 4 Slim edition – and was set to dive into the world all their great exclusives.
I’ve always flitted between consoles, be it Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo, but in all this time I’ve never been interested in PC gaming. It was only recently that my eyes truly did open to a whole new world. A good friend of mine invited me over for one of our usual nights of gaming and takeaways but something was new: a huge tower sat atop his desk looking like something straight out of the Star Trek Enterprise.
We dove straight into playing Rise Of The Tomb Raider because we wanted to see how well this could perform. The game loaded up and we scrolled through the display options, but I didn’t think much was different. You had the usual, brightness, gamma, and difficulty settings all exactly the same as console. But then we hit Advanced. I was in awe of how much you could tweak, with shadow textures, anti-aliasing, hairworks, tessellation, and draw distance to name a few.
I had the game on the PS4 Pro running at 4K resolution, and on this PC we were running it at 1080p on ultra settings. My expectations were not that high, I couldn’t get my head around why 1080p would look better than 4K.
After loading up the game I could not believe how beautiful it looked. The sun was reflecting off the sweat on Lara’s face, the framerate was smooth and flawless, and the leaves in the breeze blew effortlessly. It was from this first moment I knew I had to get a PC. Soon.
So I began my research, endlessly viewing YouTube videos for hours to cover all the basics. I had no idea what all the jargon meant, but I was determined to learn. I narrowed down what I needed to a few main categories, to make it slightly easier for myself.
- Case – This is what’s going to contain and protect all your components, I recommend having one with a glass window. It’s amazing to watch what’s going on inside.
- Motherboard – The motherboard controls and allows all the other components to communicate with each other.
- CPU – Effectively the brain of the whole system. Getting a fast CPU allows you to run more things at once and allows for faster framerates in games too.
- RAM – This is what is used for running Windows and other applications, the larger the RAM the less likely you’re going to get lag when you use multiple programs at once.
- GPU – The most crucial component, this controls the graphics for the system.
- Power Supply Unit – PSU provides a constant current to all the components inside the system, making sure that they are running effectively.
- SSD – This is high speed storage, run Windows off the SSD and you will see how incredibly fast it actually is.
- HDD – Your main storage of all your programs and games, I’d recommend 1TB at least.
- OS – This is your operating system, I’d recommend using the latest Windows.
So there is a basic list of the essentials that you need, you can dive in to more advanced areas but for a novice like me who knew nothing about PC this helped me begin to build my PC. I hope it helps you out and gets you into the word of PC gaming!
By reader Louis Turner
The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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