PC Gaming general discussion (Gaming PCs, game sales, news, etc...)

The Game Room
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Skyrim is currently 60% off at Humble Store. (Link.) I’m tempted. I prefer to wait for 75% or better sales, but 60% off is tempting.

Didn’t this remastered version just come out like a month ago? 60% off already feels early. It also makes me think if I wait a little longer there will be an even better sale before too long. But I don’t know if I can resist the siren call. I’ve never seen or read anything about it; I will be coming in 100% cold. (As I said above, I thought it was a space game, like Kotor or something, which is why my curiosity was never piqued.) Not knowing anything only makes me more excited for it, because I think I’ll love it.

The only reason I might be able to resist at all – the reason I didn’t buy it immediately – is because I’m starting to get way into Cities: Skylines. Last night I found myself dreaming about highway exchanges as I went to sleep.

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Is it that the motherboard (looks nice!) won’t fit in your current computer’s case? Note that your motherboard is most likely a Z170, not 7170. The “Z” is the nicer line, as opposed to a “B” or “H”.

Even if it won’t fit in the case, why can’t you salvage the PSU you’re currently using for the new system? If it already runs the video card now, I would think it’d be fine. (Actually nevermind, the i7 probably pulls noticeably more watts than what you’re upgrading from. EDIT: Especially if you’re overclocking, which I think you can do with that CPU and motherboard.)

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Mostly it’s that the case I have is a stock Dell case (and PSU) and I’ve run in to problems with proprietary Dell stuff before :slight_smile: I haven’t checked but I’m hunching that either there won’t be enough connections or that they’ll be specific to Dell mobos. It’s a workstation I got from my wife’s work when they were doing upgrades and selling off the old, I grabbed it up because it had a 960 in it and I got the whole thing for the price of the used GPU! But being a workstation, Xeon processor and ECC RAM it didn’t make sense to upgrade rather than just start over.

I have my eye on a case and 650w PSU on Newegg that are on sale right now, hopefully they’ll still be on sale in a week or two.

The funny thing about the PSU is that the machine I built for my son has a 750w PSU that would be perfect. I also got it for a great deal even though his machine doesn’t need it. BUT I can’t steal it because it has RGB lights and he thinks the lights are cool :smile:

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Dells are a huge pain in the ass to work with. I’ve converted Optiplex boxes to gaming PCs before but it requires special adapters for the new PSU you’ll need to run anything other than a low-power card. Newer machines like the Alienwares have proprietary shit baked right into the board BIOS so you can’t even plug in 3rd party case fans without it losing its shit. If you’re prepared, it’s annoying. If you’re expecting it to work like a normal PC, it’s a nightmare.

Congratulations on the new hardware! Hope you get your case and PSU soon so you can put it to good use.

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Steam released their Top 2021 lists including top sellers, most played hours, most successful (by revenue) EA “graduates”, etc. I’ll admit that the top sellers list is a bit disappointing with much of it held by games that we’ve been playing for years and years now. Feels like the typical complaint about Hollywood and remakes/sequels except these aren’t even nominally new.

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I was torn on what to do with the steam winter sales.

I’ve gotten really into cities skylines, which I got just the base game for $10 on sale earlier this month. Now 60 hours in just playing vanilla, I’m pretty annoyed about the existence and amount of all the DLC packs, which are on sale for 50% off. The big three I would get would run me a little under $20 on sale. But I already spent $10 on this game. And I suspect I can accomplish most of what I want with mods anyway.

So I picked up Skyrim at 68% off and Portal for 80% off. I feel good about both. Skyrim is installing as I compose this post.

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DLC for C:S is hit or miss. Fantastic game, but yeah, a lot of what the DLC offer you can accomplish with mods, or they are so transformative it almost makes it a different game.

You’ll want to mod it up pretty heavily anyways as it’s more or less a traffic simulation at heart, and the vanilla base game AI drivers are awful.

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Skyrim is still a fantastic game all these years later. You should have a lot of fun. I’d hold off on mods until you get used to the base game, then carefully use just a few mods to enhance what you like or change what you don’t like. For example, I like “Darker Nights, Brighter Torches.”

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Counterpoint: Replace all the NPCs with anime girls, the weapons with pool noodles and the dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine! Also, silly hats on everyone/thing.

…what?

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Counter suggestion: research the most popular quality of life mods and install them immediately. Many of them make the game objectively better and there’s no reason to bother playing without them.

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And as of last evening the machine is up and running.

Pretty happy with it, I’m killing everything I want to play so far at 1080p on Ultra. Titles that are a few years old, granted, but it’s fun to be able to max them out.

The only snag I ran in to was that it had a stock Intel cooler on it. I asked the guy I bought it from if that was going to be enough because I was pretty wary of that, he said yeah I’ll be OK as long as I don’t overclock.

Well 3 nights ago I ran the 3DMark Timespy benchmark on it to compare it to my other machines. During the CPU test it hit 100C. So not only was the cooling inadequate, but there was only a trace of thermal paste. So last night I put a massive CPU cooler on it and now it maxes out at a comfortable 79C. And that’s under load test, just regular gaming I’m well, well below that.

I’m picking up a new 1440p curved monitor tomorrow, and then it’ll be done and get me through 5 years or so.

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Nice, gratz! I love playing old games at max settings.

Good call replacing the cooler. Sounds like it’s all squared away with a simple air cooler now. Gotta love that.

The only downside to the shiny new monitor coming is that 1440p will put more pressure on your 1660 than 1080p would. But still, it sounds awesome.

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Skyrim’s first impression was poor.

First, the audio is extremely quiet. Much quieter than any other game on my computer. In fact, every other game I’ve ever installed plays at a consistent volume to everything else on my computer. Video players, music players, games; just about everything I’ve ever installed plays sound at a consistent enough level that I can just leave Windows master volume at 50% and fine tune any given game or video as needed.

Not Skyrim. With Windows master volume at 50% it simply cannot get loud enough to hear voices unless I’m standing right next to the NPC talking and looking directly at them. After googling and tinkering – which is annoying when most of the answers are 7 to 10 years old, often with dead links – switching my Windows sound from stereo (as it should be for my headphones) to surround 5.1 with only L/R speakers enabled didn’t help. But it turns out raising my Windows master volume to 80% makes Skyrim sound normal.

But now every other thing on my computer is way too loud and must be individually turned down. And, I expect, every new game I install will be blaringly loud until turned down. This is a price I’m willing to pay for an awesome game, but it hasn’t gotten awesome yet.

Another annoyance from being an old game is the 60 fps hard limit, but I’m not overly bothered by that. I do enjoy running all ultra with a rock steady 60 fps at least.

Unfortunately the first intro mission went poorly. I couldn’t hear the guy telling me to follow him the first try, so I ended up running around aimlessly for 10 to 15 minutes with a crowd of NPCs all telling me to go to the Keep. My innate inability to find things in games (the bane of my Subnautica experience) reared its ugly head, eventually leading to a rage quit and looking up on wiki how to complete the mission. The very first intro mission. Not the best start.

As for mods, I have a strong preference for using my xbox controller, and it seems like some of the best mods assume mouse & keyboard. Also in general I like my first experience to be vanilla.

If it grabs me and becomes an obsession I’m willing to fuck up my entire computer’s audio levels for it, but it’s really annoying to have to do that. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’m expecting to love this game to death. Anything short of that and I would have already uninstalled and tried to get a refund. I’m picky about audio levels. Hell, I hand-normalized all 800+ mp3 files in my music library one at a time in Audacity. Having to jack up my Windows master volume pisses me off a lot.

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The sound issues are one thing that Windows almost has a fix for. You can set the volume individually for games. The problem, however, is that you can’t set the main volume lower than the game’s volume, to handle games that are too quiet.

I’m also assuming that the in-game volume controls have the speech turned all the way up, so you can’t fix it that way.

In that case, I’d probably use the program below, and write a small script that would increase the volume, launch Skyrim, and then turn it back down after it closes.

(If I didn’t have a headache, I’d try making one right now for you.)

SetVol - free command line utility to set your Windows master volume level

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Yeah actually I had the same thought after posting, thanks much for the link. Don’t worry about the nuts and bolts; I can manage the scripting.

Several games I have installed, including Skyrim, don’t launch directly. Instead they open a settings screen where you can change settings before launching the game. I have a little autohotkey script setup that I tailor for each of those games to automatically click through when launching from my little controller-enabled custom games menu.

Since I already need to use my autohotkey script for Skyrim anyway, managing the volume at the same time should work fine.

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If you’re already using AutoHotkey, there’s no need for an additional program. It has the following command:

https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/commands/SoundSet.htm

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More like “As long as you don’t overclock and only run office applications”. Intel stock coolers are pretty trash. They’re adequate for running Windows and light tasks but struggle under load. Sounds though you already discovered and corrected for that, though. Glad to hear it’s performing well!

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TYTY! Picked up the monitor tonight, and woooowww…

I have never forayed above 1080p, 60Hz. And even when we were in that world, we (that is, me and my old machines) were hard pressed to push those limits. This is a freaking level up.

It’s like…I can’t see pixels. There is no blur… What kind of world was I living in, before!!!

I tried several games to see what I could do, I and am blown away.

Right before I posted this, I was playing Forza Horizon 4 on Ultra settings and getting 110+ fps.

I launched Subnautica for the first time in a while just for fun, and it was absolutely smooth and beautiful. When I first got it, I had to turn the settings all the way down just to play.

The Outer Worlds was sublime. I showed my wife, and she said (edited and condensed) “Wow, it was a beautiful game before, but now…”

The Division 2 pressed the hardest, but I was still able to pull off acceptable (60+) frame rates with everything maxed out.

I got Death Stranding a while ago and had never installed it, but I did for this. Amazing. I just got 10 minutes in to it, but I think I’ll have to play it just to look at.

Oh, and also Farm Simulator 22…that looks pretty good too. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Now that I think about it, I probably should check out Trine again…

And my temps are still nice and cool.

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Nice!

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I just started playing minecraft. I know. I’m a late adopter. Also, I’m using it as a builder, I’m not really “playing” it. But with it being such an old game, there isn’t much newbie information that I can find. Is there a fast travel option? I see that there is a portal available. Would that get me around on the map quicker?