Learn from my mistake

Last year I made an investment into my personal setup to improve my monitors as the old ones were starting to have issues. I went from a mismatched pair of 1080p monitors to a matched pair of 1440p.

This has been a great improvement for the productivity side of things. I was surprised that my company laptop could drive both monitors. There were some teething issues but that always happens when you change hardware. The bigger issue was on the gaming side of things.

That time is here again

My PC is trying to keep up with a native resolution that is much bigger than it was and it is struggling. Helldivers 2 has been a moment where it has become obvious that my PC has grown old and I need to make some changes.

I run AIDA 64 on my second monitor to keep watch on my PCs performance in case something out of the ordinary happens. Helldivers 2 has just red-lined my PC every time. The poor thing is struggling to keep up.

Minimum is looking pretty tall

Recently Horizon Forbidden West has released on PC and I had a look at the minimum specs. While I don’t hold a lot to these as I don’t know what kind of performance you get for each, but there is no mistake that the minimum spec is coming for my PC.

There have been points in Helldivers 2 that I get less than 10 frames per second. Usually when various orbital bombardments are kicking off.

I am looking at also doing development work and more gaming (including getting back into VR and space sims) and anything released this year is becoming a tall order for my computer.

Throw money at it

So I have been looking around to see what a decent spec PC is going to cost me. Upgrading is off the cards as I need a better CPU and my motherboard will not support one.

So how much will a new PC cost? £2k and up it seems. I spec’d a PC on Cyberpower and by the time I was done I was in for £3.5k! It doesn’t help that I need to look at getting a new mechanical keyboard too as my current one (a logitech G613) took a cup of tea to the face and has never been the same.

I originally was thinking about buying this via finance. I remembered the days of 0% finance over 36 months. You wont find that today. 17% Seems to be the going rate. When you do the math on that it would increase a £3.5k dream PC for me to a little over £4k!

So I am going to sell a bunch of stuff and hopefully get what I need together. Insomnia is coming up at the NEC this month and with a little luck I can get some discounts.