[Spud6]

Anyone BGR members game on a computer? If you do, did you build yours or buy a prebuilt PC?

[Hoot Gibson]

Anyone BGR members game on a computer? If you do, did you build yours or buy a prebuilt PC?

I don't game much on my computer but it is a good "gaming PC." My old computer is a prebuilt Dell Inspiron gaming PC, which has an AMD Ryzen 2700 CPU with an AMD Radeon RX 580 video card.

My new PC is my own build. I am waiting on delivery of an Intel Arc A770 video card to finish the build, but I have been using the computer with its onboard GPU for about a month. The components that I used are listed below:

Case: Lian Li Lancool III

Motherboard: Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO ATX AM5 Motherboard

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950x 16 core, 32 thread

RAM: 32 GB DDR5

Storage: Crucial 2 TB SSD

Power Supply: Asus ROG THOR 850P 850 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

I had a difficult time deciding on my video card because I wanted somthing that would support gaming at 1080p but I also wanted something that would do a good job with video editing software such as Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve, in case I decided that I wanted to get into video production. The Arc A770 card gets very mixed reviews because it shipped with some buggy video drivers but it decodes/encodes AV1 video better than a $1,600+ Invidea RTX 4090 card. Since I don't game a lot, I decided that I can live with some buggy drivers until Intel updates them and went with the $349 video card. The Inel card included Call of Duty: Warzone 2 and some video and image editing applications. I also have a few video games on Steam but I don't consider myself a gamer. It is nice to know that I have a PC that will let me do some serious gaming if I want but I mostly wanted the hardware to compile code and run virtual machines.

This is a great time to build a new PC. Good video cards are semi-affordable and even $100 CPUs are very powerful compared to what was available only 3 years ago. I wanted something that promised a solid upgrade path for at least 5 years without having to start from scratch. I would recommend building a PC instead of buying a prebuilt to anybody with any technical skills. Companies like Dell intentionally cripple their PCs to drive sales of new computers. They have no interest in making it easy for customers to upgrade their Dell PCs with a faster CPU or better video card.

[Hoot Gibson]

I installed an Intel Arc A770 video card with 16 GB VRAM into my new computer and have been very pleased with its performance. Intel has been fixing the drivers for the laptop and I have had no issues with its performance. The Arc A750 with 8 GB VRAM performs almost as well and Intel recently reduced its price from $289 to $249.

I recently downloaded CorelDraw, which relies on the video card for many functions, and the performance improvement for CorelDraw over previous computers has been amazing. I use CorelDraw to prepare jobs for my laser engraver/cutter, and the Arc video card will save me a lot of time.