TurtleFish

I avoided Biology. We did an Intro to Biology unit in Grade 10, and I discovered I couldn't stand the smell of formaldehyde, and I couldn't handle dissecting things.

Of the other physical sciences, Chemistry was probably my favourite because I'm old enough that they still let us play around with bunsen burners and things that burned really well. :)

I would love to see something like Best of Giant Bomb back -- without much free time, Best of Giant Bomb was a really good way for me to see what happened over the past few weeks at GB and then I could go back and watch the stuff that caught my eye.

Exactly.

Three words - I Love Mondays.

I think Giant Bomb is like Mario Kart - your first Giant Bomb is your favourite Giant Bomb. :)

Really vague memories of Pong and playing consoles on display at the local Sears (Atari 2600 and Intellivision), but, my first really firm game memory was Computer Club in Grade 2 circa 1980 -- one day a week after school, I could line up with the rest of my assigned group to use Commodore PET computers, and, if you behaved, you got to try some of the BASIC games off the tape drive.

I know the concept of the 'objective review' is impossible, but, any additional information from a third party that is independent from the company producing the product is valuable in deciding where to spend my time and money. You have to be careful of source these days (since everybody with a webcam claims to be doing a review, there's a difference between "your opinion on a product" and "your review of a product", IMHO), but given the way the game companies control the channel, any independent verification has value.

That's what I miss the most about "classic" Giant Bomb -- I feel like breadth coverage has switched to depth coverage, and man, I miss the breadth.

For people who have noted about doing it before you move - yes, I totally agree, doing it before is better. But, sometimes, you don't do it before. :)

For me, I'm a pack rat - I'm the guy who goes "What if I need X?" It's compounded by the fact that I can usually remember a half-dozen examples where I DID throw something out -- and it turns out I did need X. :) (Yes, I know that's confirmation bias, but, it's hard to argue with the meat sack that's your brain sometimes.) And even if I commit to throwing stuff out, it can take months before I get around to it, if I get around to it at all. I always seem to have major timesinks in my life, esp. given my choice of career.

Yeah - though, in my experience, case heat does tend to be situational. Like, I currently have a i9-10900K with RTX 3080 setup (i9 is on an AIO cooling setup, GPU is on stock air), which can really put out the thermal watts at full bore -- but right now, since I'm mostly playing indie titles at the moment, I very rarely see anything above 60C. OTH, my machine is also located in the basement of my house, underneath the air register vent (open in the summer for air con, closed in the winter to avoid sucking in heat) and my PC is setup at desk level in an old wire rack I grabbed from a machine room when the company got sold and we were told we could take anything we wanted. In other words, my PC is pretty much in the optimal airflow environment, which means it's going to run cooler than an equivalent sitting on a rug on the floor in a living room with a dog sleeping beside it.

The point I was trying to make was to make sure you need stuff before you buy it. It sounds like budget is an issue, and God, the number of times I did something like "Hmmm, my case could use some extra cooling, maybe I'll try these highly reviewed fans", paid $20 CDN a fan for a set of five fans (gotta love exchange rates), spent an afternoon remounting fans (with a side of "well, I'm in here, let me redo the wiring and see if I can get better airflow that way") and discovered that my temps had changed by like 3C at peak when running endurance stress tests. Not a good use of money. :)

Admittedly, my personal bias is that I have a lot less time in my late 40s to tinker with crap then I did in my late 20s when I didn't have a wife, a child, or a mortgage. So, like what most everybody else has said, you do you. Just wanted to inject a note of caution into all the enthusiasm -- I'm that somebody who has sunk tens of thousands of dollars into making the "best damn gaming PC possible" -- and all of those fancy builds were still obsolete within 5 years. :) In the end, if it's good enough for you, it's good enough for you.

Given the premiums you pay for prebuilt machines (especially if you're buying Alienware or other 'brand' names), if you're looking at swapping mobo, case and cooler, you're pretty much gutting the damn thing anyway and killing your warranty -- you might want to take that budget, look at returns and getting your money back, and see what you can get if you buy the parts separately and do the assembly yourself. Admittedly, part availability (especially for GPUs) is a major issue right now (and my warning about upgrade parts is also out there) -- but you probably could get equivalent performance for half the price and the same amount of labour.

Anyway, whatever you decide to do, good luck.

Okay. I’m going to say something that’s going to be really unpopular in some circles. This is coming from somebody who has been a PC first gamer since the 1980s, and has built his own desktop rigs since the 1990s. (Last desktop I got prebuilt was a Vtech Laser 286/3X - so yeah, I’ve been doing this awhile.)

Try the PC first for several months. If you haven’t been in the PC space for a while, and assuming reviews from multiple sites aren’t freaking out about your purchase, go and install your game of choice and start playing and enjoy your purchase for a few months. Don’t worry about optimization. Hell, if it’s not in your face stupid (Lenovo, I’m looking at you), I wouldn‘t even worry too much about optimizing the Windows install. (Like remove the obvious bloatware, but beyond that…?)

There’s a lot of good advice here, but you might not need any of it. You could be completely fine with what you have and not need to touch a thing. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and decided where you want upgrades or fine tuning, then go ahead. Otherwise, you can spend so much tuning your PC that you never spend any time using your PC, since everything can be improved. (And the cost, oh the money you can spend…)

As long as you’re not trying to squeeze the last few percent out of your rig, you can get great gaming performance with stock settings and hardware with modern PCs. (With the caveat that the manufacturer has at least made some effort. That Alienware machine in the YouTube video looks terrible, even though I personally pigeonhole Gamers Nexus into the clickbaity side of YouTube and thus take everything on that channel with a big grain of salt.)

In any event, given the shenanigans that some part suppliers have been up to (e.g. SSD memory swaps) I wouldn’t even look at upgrade parts for a year or so in any event. So you‘ve got some time.

From my perspective (Chinese descent, born in the early 1970s), everything is the product of it's time. I don't hold anything against Jade Empire for what it was trying to do, nor against people who enjoy it, as long as they recognize it's shortcomings. I actually enjoyed it myself, since I got to play as a martial artist in a game that actually tried to do something beyond "Bruce Lee Clone." But, it's shortcomings always struck me as being a naive but well meaning attempt at doing something with a foreign culture, as opposed to something motivated by malicious hate.

Having experience with the latter, and having the mental scars to show for it, Jade Empire doesn't even rank on the list of things that concern me about portrayals of Chinese / Asian culture in media.