Giant Bomb Video Game News

Things are a little different now that I'm using a MacBook Pro as my main computer, but man, nothing used to make me crazier than a broken PC. At my height of PC building and fixing, I knew exactly where to put every piece of the puzzle... but invariably, something would still prevent the machine from actually working until I spent another few hours ripping it apart and putting it back together.

Usually, it was because I was improperly mounting the motherboard inside the case, causing it to ground out and do absolutely nothing when powered up. Because I'm an idiot. But that's still not the root cause. The first time I had to open up a non-functioning PC and attempt to make it go again, it was because the motherboard had basically "blown out." I was probably 19 or 20, pacing back and forth, totally stressing. That's still the image I get in my head when people talk about "Internet addiction."

After going through this process of my motherboard being somehow destroyed, ordering a new one, clumsily attempting to replace it, failing, figuring out what was wrong, fixing that, and using the machine until it all somehow happened again, I eventually figured out that some kind of power conditioner or a better power strip was required. But that's probably the most stressful busted-up PC story I've got.

Last week, my PC started acting up in a decidedly "your hardware is broken" kind of way. At first, it seemed like video card driver issues. I'm running the Windows 7 release candidate that Microsoft put out a little while ago, so it wasn't a huge stretch to assume that the problems were driver issues mixed with a little bit of "this is why you shouldn't run pre-release versions of operating systems."

After rolling the drivers back, though, the problem only got worse. It wasn't long until I had thick lines of screen corruption running through everything as soon as I powered up. Once you've got things to the point where they look broken before your OS even loads, it's got to be hardware. Or, at least, that's what I told myself. I guess that's the thing about fixing computers. It's hardly an exact science and unless you're going to go out and buy a bunch of equipment to help you test things out or replace every component until you find the culprit, it all feels a little bit like a shot in the dark.

So I played the educated guess game and decided that my video card had to be fried. Without any on-board video to swap to and without another video card to drop in to test my theory, it was hard to know. But I've always gone by my gut with this stuff, and I haven't ended up needlessly replacing components yet.

But what to get? The video card wars have led me to get ATI boards in some cases, Nvidia in others. Hell, thanks to me buying my last machine completely assembled instead of building it myself, I wasn't even 100 percent sure about what type of slot my existing video card was using. After a bit of research, some public griping on Twitter, and asking around a little bit, it sounded like Nvidia was still the way to go, primarily due to better drivers and a wider range of hardware.

I briefly flirted with spending way too much money on a GeForce GTX 295--that's apparently the top of the line right now. But I'm absolutely impatient when it comes to stuff like this. So I ended up at a Best Buy, knowing that they wouldn't have the top of the line card, and that they probably wouldn't have the best price on anything. That said, buying it locally meant it'd be easier to return in the event that replacing the video card didn't change my situation.

As it turns out, the highest-end Nvidia card you can get at the Best Buy in Marin City is a GeForce GTX 260 sold by PNY. This is about four steps down from the top-end card, I guess. But it was also on sale, bringing it down to around the $200 mark, which seemed to be closer to what it was selling for online. Not wanting to deal with the hassle of a broken PC for any longer than I needed to, I grabbed it and got out of there before I found myself pricing out RAM or something.

Now, when it comes to PC components, I haven't done anything more interesting than insert new hard drives in at least a couple of years. And this Dell I've got is full of all kinds of fans and braided cables and stuff like that. But the particulars of putting in a new video card really haven't changed. I yanked the old 8800 Ultra, took a moment to blow all the dust out of my case, tossed in the new card, and hoped for the best. It immediately worked. Problem solved.

New hardware, of course, leads to the giddiness of seeing existing games running better than they did before. But I couldn't really think of any one game that would satisfy that itch. The Street Fighter IV benchmark now runs better than it did before, and I played a little Unreal Tournament 3 with everything turned up as high as it'll go. Yup, it's smoother. And after discovering that it most definitely wasn't a Windows 7 issue, I went over to Amazon and pre-ordered a copy of the Professional edition, since they're selling pre-orders for 50 percent off. The release candidate's been great so far.

That's about it, though. I mean, am I supposed to go back and reinstall Crysis and see how it runs now? Am I supposed to buy ArmA II and marvel at my frame rate, even though the game probably isn't for me? After staring at a stack of PC games from the last two years and coming up with nothing, I kind of got a little sad. The repair-motivated hardware upgrade used to be a momentous occasion that led to an increase in game playing. This time, I was more happy that I could once again get at my iTunes library. Now I'm just left wondering if this says more about the state of PC gaming (and the relative strength of today's consoles) or about me.