I’m almost 60 and I just bought a gaming PC
What is so big deal about buying a gaming PC? Well, I’m almost 60 years old and being a Mac user for more than half my life, it would seem impossible that I would ever consider buying a PC for home use. So, let me share why I buy this PC and how I decided on the model I bought. It has not been an easy exercise to buy a PC and I hope my experience will help others in how they could go about choosing their own PC, especially for gaming.
Let me share first about why I am gaming in the first place. In my earlier article (Playing Call of Duty when you are in mid fifties), I have shared about how I started gaming during the Covid days. I have been playing Call of Duty since 2020 and I am a grinder for daily and weekly challenges. Meaning, I play about 1 to 2 hours every day (including the weekends), where I will complete the daily and weekly challenges in the game and also have some fun going for other objectives (eg. grinding for a nice camouflage for a gun or grinding to raise the levels of the weapon).
Here is how my PC looks like. It is based on a chassis from Fractal Tera (https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/terra/terra/terra-jade/). I wanted it to be compact as I have limited desk space.
The chassis can also be easily opened up for user installation:
Here is the specs of my PC:
I chose AMD CPUs instead of Intel because I plan to use the PC for server workloads (other than gaming) and I need the CPU processing to be evenly spread out over the CPU cores. With this AMD CPU, I could create 4 virtual machines with 4 vCPUs each. This AMD CPU has 8 cores with 2 hardware threads on each core. Now your mileage will differ depending on what you want to do with your PC. For me, I intend to use it for software evaluation and testing. I would install many different software with wide range of hardware resources. My PC comes with 32GB memory and 4TB of SSD. You are likely going to need different amount of CPU cores, memory and SSD storage. For gaming, the minimum comfortable amount would be 8 CPU cores, 16 GB memory and 1TB SSD. This amount of resources would be adequate for most normal usage (Internet browsing, email and essential document management).
You may have different taste in terms of the look for PC. Many young folks would prefer fancy RGB lighting and see-through chassis, but for someone like me, it would be better to be more discrete to garner less attention. Now all PCs for gaming are going to be operating really hot. You might have noticed I have a couple of USB fans on my desk. My PC does feel really hot when I’m gaming and I would actually point a USB fan on the chassis (see the white fan in the figure below).
I bought the PC from a local PC custom builder (Aftershock), this is how it looks on my desk:
There are three computers on the desk other than my PC: a Mac Studio, a MacBook Pro (Intel) and a Dell laptop (from my company).
The most important consideration for me is that the PC must be compact. It needs to live with its neighbors. In this picture, they all share the same 27 inch display monitor from LG which connects the keyboard and mouse via a wireless interface. Also connected to the display is a pair of gaming speakers from Razer. This allows me to use a single USB-C cable to connect to any of my computers for screen, keyboard, mouse and audio. This monitor is however not adequate as it only has two USB slots: one contains the Logitech Universal receiver (connected to MX Master 3S mouse and a MX Mechanical Mini keyboard) and the other connects to the Razer Nommo Chroma Speakers. I recently replaced my monitor with the Alienware AWS3225QF Qd-OLED 32" Monitor. This comes with three USB slots and I am now also able to connect the Logitech Brio (placed at the top of the monitor) for video calls.
However, this monitor does not have a USB Type-C input for video input. So, I added a small USB hub from Dell (DA305) to meet this need. Now all my computers can enjoy the use of this fantastic 32 inch display with automatic switching for keyboard, mouse, speaker and vide conferencing. I can even connect to my iPad Pro to use as a secondary display.
Now, choosing a display is no simple task as there are simply too many choices and prices. There are essentially four major decisions to make. What devices do you need to connect to the display and how do you connect to the display? What is the panel type and size? What resolution do you need? And what frequency must the display support.
HDMI is the most common interface to connect to your devices. PCs, laptops and game consoles all support this interface. Display Port is the other common interface to connect to PCs and finally the USB Type-C interface offers a common way to connect laptops. Most monitors support two or more interfaces and so you need to know in advance what devices you are going to connect to the monitor.
Next is the display panel type. There are essentially four types: TN, VA, IPS, and OLED and they come in a wide variety of sizes. There are many articles you can google to know more about them and you need to pick the right panel type for the tasks you want to do with your display. Then there is the size question. How big must your display be? For gamers, 24 inch is great as you typically sit at a close distance from your screen. For image and video editing, a larger screen will benefit your eyes. And if you want to watch video, then 32 inch or larger would be nice.
Next is the display resolution and frequency. This can be 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p/4K and in different frequency, from 25, 30, 60 Hz to 120 Hz, to 240 Hz and even 480 Hz. For most daily use, 60 Hz would be an excellent choice. But for gaming you need to start with 120 Hz. For display resolution, there are standard screen size or wide angle screen size. Some gamers prefer a greater immersive experience with wider screens (so that they could see more of the screen), while some will prefer high quality display with 4K. There is a cost element to this as higher quality, higher resolution and wider frame all will mean higher cost.
There is also the curve screen option. Some will think it’s a waste of money while others will find it more immersive to look at the screen. For me, I have three viewing perspective. When I am viewing text information on the screen, I tend to sit closer to the screen at about 1 foot away. A 27 inch screen is already too big for me to be able to look at the screen at all corners while seated at the same position. I also often need to look at images and short video playback. For that, I’ll sit a bit further at roughly 2 or 3 feet away from the screen. This lets me view the image or video in a fairly large window (larger than a quarter of the screen size). Lastly, I would also like to watch video in full screen mode from Netflix and others. I would then sit about 3 or 4 feet away from the screen. So, a curved screen work excellent for me.
For me, I chose a 32 inch OLED curved panel for display because apart from normal usage, I need to use for image editing and gaming. The recent availability of Samsung’s Qd-OLED panels at a reasonable price makes it still affordable for me to use this panel. The Alienware panel I have is based on Samsung’s Qd-OLED panel and it currently is the only one with a curved screen. It comes with 4K display and 240Hz. As my current COD gaming typically runs with 120Hz (on a PlayStation 5) , I am happy to equip this display with a GPU that is fast enough to run at 120Hz framerate for COD.
After you have decided on the display, the next issue is the GPU required. This is one of the major cost items in your PC. You would need to choose between an AMD or Nvidia GPU. In the past, they each have a SYNC signal type to work best with certain displays. But lately, most displays support both G-Sync (Nvidia) and FreeSync (AMD) to prevent screen tearing. Next is then deciding the performance required from the GPU. This should be done by consulting the game recommendations as different game uses GPU to perform at different framerate. For COD, 120 Hz is adequate for me.
I hope I have covered all the major areas in buying a PC for gaming. At the moment, I am roughly halfway setting up my PC. I intended to setup dual boot with a separate SSD for Linux boot, to do my software evaluation and testing. The current AMD CPU is a little too new to work with the current Ubuntu. VMware Workstation still works but is not adequate for me (need KVM). So, I will still take some time to complete my setup. In the future, I hope to write more articles on the work I’m going to do with the PC with Linux. In the meantime, I hope this article is useful to you. Thank you for reading my article.
PS: I have left out the chair issue. You may not need a full gaming chair, but a tiltable chair would be very comfortable.
