"Gaming" hardware. - How to pay over the odds for stupid angular flummery and pointless flashing lights.

[Ginger Piglet]

Well, it's like the subtitle says really.

I've been contemplating a new PC build later this year and I have to trawl through page after page of this crap to find parts that I might want to buy. For the record, I'm a fan of trying to squeeze as powerful hardware as possible into as miniscule a case as I can and I'm contemplating a build in the utterly miniscule Silverstone SG13 case.

Anyhow, there's a few mobos that would fit my requirement and all bar one have stupidly shaped oversized heatsinks on the chipset, steel "reinforcement" on the PCIe slot, and "military grade" this and that. The one that doesn't have all this bollox is an Asrock number which ironically has more features than the so-called "gaming" boards:

Versus the "gaming" hardware which is significantly more Good Boy Points to purchase. Note the lack of M.2 slots and/or built in wifi (okay, the latter isn't a deal breaker because I have a USB wifi adapter, but the M.2 slot is because in a small form factor build a SATA drive means more cable spaghetti)

But hey, they have colour changing RGB LEDs, so s'cool.

Then there's "gaming" keyboards which have oversized bits hanging off of them and backlighting because apparently playing vidya buggers your eyes so much you need to be able to see where your fingers are. "Gaming" mice with stupid amounts of buttons. "Gaming" RAM sticks with oversized heatsinks dangling off them which just clog up space and get you practically no extra frames per second. Everything has to be red on black because everyone knows red ones go faster. Or festooned with fucking RGB LEDs. It's like those bazzed up old Vauxhall Novas that you used to see in the early 2000s like they've fallen out of The Fast and the Furious with lighting and giant subwoofers and eye-watering paint jobs but still the same asthmatic 1.2L four-cylinder engine they always had.

It doesn't even look good for fuck's sakes. Give me the form following function any day.

 

[DangerousGas]

But how will you know that it's good for gaming if it's not covered in ephemeral tat?

 

[XYZpdq]

I get the cheap Chinese "gaming mice" on eBay that go for about three bucks including shipping.
They have left and right, vertical scroll wheel/middle click, forward and backward on the side, and a slow/med/fast button in the middle.
Most of them cycle through that cheap led color pattern. Looks nice enough.

Really happy with how they've worked out so far, I use them for WoW, work, basically everything.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

I do all my gaming with a Dell keyboard that is like ... 10 years old at this point.

My "gaming PC" is a plain black Corsair case stuffed with good guts and the biggest quietest Noctua cooling fans I could find (like 4 NF-A15's! Shit cost a bunch of money but I splurged). It has 1 blinky white light on the front of the tower to denote HDD activity and that is the only light it emits. It makes almost no noise when it's running anything but the most taxing games.

I call it the Monolith.

I hate the way most "gaming" shit looks like it fell off a Transformer. Hence my super plain setup.

 

[Un Platano]

I bought some cheapass fans that were $12 for a 3 pack. They had blue LEDs in them and I hate them now, but they were cheaper together than some single fans.

 

[Doc Cassidy]

Well, it's like the subtitle says really.

I've been contemplating a new PC build later this year and I have to trawl through page after page of this crap to find parts that I might want to buy. For the record, I'm a fan of trying to squeeze as powerful hardware as possible into as miniscule a case as I can and I'm contemplating a build in the utterly miniscule Silverstone SG13 case.

Anyhow, there's a few mobos that would fit my requirement and all bar one have stupidly shaped oversized heatsinks on the chipset, steel "reinforcement" on the PCIe slot, and "military grade" this and that. The one that doesn't have all this bollox is an Asrock number which ironically has more features than the so-called "gaming" boards:

Versus the "gaming" hardware which is significantly more Good Boy Points to purchase. Note the lack of M.2 slots and/or built in wifi (okay, the latter isn't a deal breaker because I have a USB wifi adapter, but the M.2 slot is because in a small form factor build a SATA drive means more cable spaghetti)

But hey, they have colour changing RGB LEDs, so s'cool.

Then there's "gaming" keyboards which have oversized bits hanging off of them and backlighting because apparently playing vidya buggers your eyes so much you need to be able to see where your fingers are. "Gaming" mice with stupid amounts of buttons. "Gaming" RAM sticks with oversized heatsinks dangling off them which just clog up space and get you practically no extra frames per second. Everything has to be red on black because everyone knows red ones go faster. Or festooned with fucking RGB LEDs. It's like those bazzed up old Vauxhall Novas that you used to see in the early 2000s like they've fallen out of The Fast and the Furious with lighting and giant subwoofers and eye-watering paint jobs but still the same asthmatic 1.2L four-cylinder engine they always had.

It doesn't even look good for fuck's sakes. Give me the form following function any day.

Tom's Hardware does pretty great lists imo. I'm currently rebuilding an old PC after going without one for about ten years and they're really good at breaking it down for people who aren't currently in the know.

I bought a Geforce 1050ti for $140 on their recommendation that literally came in today and I'm very happy with it.

Tom's Hardware does a fantastic breakdown of the current market every month.

Spoiler: Tom's Breakdown

Video Cards, CPUs, motherboards, Power Supplies

Edit: Make sure you pay attention to the article. It has ads that look a lot like recommendations.

 

[Lackadaisy]

All I know about computers is that they're essentially magic boxes that give me porn.

 

[Piss Clam]

One of my rigs (Q9450) is coming up on ten years...it's on 24/7 serving up and has never had an issue.

Don't scrimp on shit and even if you don't...sometimes it is the luck of the draw.

 

[c-no]

The only reason I can think why we buy LED stuff on our computers is because we like seeing bright, shiny shit. That said, I'll never understand gaming mice that have multiple buttons. I don't play MMO's so I'd rather have just regular mouse with a DPI switch and some buttons for page forward and page back.

I hate the way most "gaming" shit looks like it fell off a Transformer. Hence my super plain setup.

Outside of looks and better specs (if they do provide better performance and/or more fan headers and such), gaming mobo's aren't much.

Still, if I ever did bother to upgrade my PC in a few years, I wouldn't mind doing a build after a robot from a PS3 game I enjoy. But all that said, stuff with the word "gaming" tacked on is good only for marketing purposes to get more money from people that don't know better. Case in example: gamer brand compressed air.

 

[Un Platano]

The only part of your computer that may have tangible advantages to being called "gaming hardware" is the PSU (assuming you buy from a reputable brand and not a Diablotek gaming PSU). For parts like GPUs only the low end cards will be advertised as a gaming card to try to rope in naive buyers into buying an "MSi Gaming r7 240." For motherboards and cases there's no important difference to speak of. But PSUs can vary widely in their construction, and the gaming tag does make a difference for those. A proper gaming PSU functions better under load because it's designed with intense computing in mind. Powering a >300W GPU puts a huge load on the PSU, so just having one sufficiently rated is sometimes not enough in that situation. It's similar to how you certainly wouldn't want to use a 1200 W server PSU for powering a bunch of hard drives in a gaming rig, even though the numbers look fine.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

The only part of your computer that may have tangible advantages to being called "gaming hardware" is the PSU (assuming you buy from a reputable brand and not a Diablotek gaming PSU). For parts like GPUs only the low end cards will be advertised as a gaming card to try to rope in naive buyers into buying an "MSi Gaming r7 240." For motherboards and cases there's no important difference to speak of. But PSUs can vary widely in their construction, and the gaming tag does make a difference for those. A proper gaming PSU functions better under load because it's designed with intense computing in mind. Powering a >300W GPU puts a huge load on the PSU, so just having one sufficiently rated is sometimes not enough in that situation. It's similar to how you certainly wouldn't want to use a 1200 W server PSU for powering a bunch of hard drives in a gaming rig, even though the numbers look fine.

Absolutely. Anyone who buys a bargain basement PSU deserves everything they get.

Maplins here in the UK sell a very suspect variety of PSU that I've never seen anywhere else called "G7 Power Extreme." Had a flatmate who bought one of those rather than spend an extra twenty quids on a Corsair. It was as grey and untraceable as anything I've ever seen and started making strange noises after just a few months. Pulled it out and opened it up and there were scorch marks where things had got rather too hot for comfort. I am no electrical engineer but I have a feeling it was just a few days away from catching fire.

 

[TL 611]

I prefer form over function, but I love me some sci-fi looking cases. That makes me a bit of a twat, but there are some really flash cases out there.

"GAMING XTREME PRO" motherboards are a fucking con. They're marketed as such because people are fucking dumb - Johnny Console decides he's gonna make the switch to PC, but has absolutely no idea how the hardware works, so he trusts that the "gaming" components are better for his situation.

I know a couple of people like this, and it drives me goddamn mental. If it's designed to look like a car engine and have 50 LEDs on it, it must be better. Then they come to me like "why has this motherboard only got 2 RAM slots and no USB 3.0 connectors?" surprised that buying a motherboard totally on looks is fucking dumb.

Buying any internal components solely because it "looks cool" is dumb as shit, even if your case has a side panel. I've known people to buy shitty RAM just "to match the colour scheme" of the inside of their PC.

Saying that I'm not totally against buying flashy parts, if they're not inferior price-performance wise. I bought some high profile RAM on sale because it looked cool and was pretty much the same price/performance as anything else I could get. I absolutely didn't need high profile RAM, but fuck it, it's no worse and looks cool in the case. My graphics card is white and looks sci-fi as fuck, but I didn't buy it for that reason.

As for GAMER PERIPHERALS like mice and keyboards, I think that's a matter of preference. There are definitely some con artists out there, if you look at "gaming" keyboards and mice on any online retailer, you'll find a lot that are stupid as hell.

Shit like that ^. That ones one the cheap side, but I've seen keyboards in that style - not mechanical, RGB LEDs - go for anywhere up to like £60. That's a fucking con, at that price you can buy a mechanical keyboard that will be objectively better. The problem with stuff labelled as GAMER GEAR is that it raises the price by like 30% most of the time. You'd be better off buying something less flash, that's actually better. It's kinda cool to have backlit keys when it's dark, but it's 100% unnecessary. I shamefully have a backlit mechanical keyboard, but it doesn't look too xtreem imo. It was on sale for way cheaper than that, and I have the lights off most of the time. It looks a lot more understated with the SHINY LEDs off.

I hear people shit on Razer a lot, but honestly their prices aren't that much worse than Logitech (or any other "top tier" brand) and I've never known anybody irl have a bad time with them. Their branding is edgy as hell, but there are enough people that swear by Deathadders to show that they're not total shite. I don't use Razer because they're pisstaking cunts, seriously their merch store is INSANE, but I know plenty of people happily using Razer mice.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Yes. That's another pet hate of mine - "gaming RAM." With stupid sized heatsinks dangling off of them and allegedly higher frequencies and belt-hitching names like "Vengeance" and "Dominator" and "G.SKILL Ripjaws" yet there's literally no difference in performance unless you're overclocking massively. But it costs twice as much.

I have a mechanical keyboard but it isn't backlit. To be fair, mechanical keyboards actually feel better to type on than rubber-dome jobbies. Last longer too and are easier to clean. I kinda want an IBM Model M... does this make me a pseud though?

 

[Ravelord]

Meh, I was on a budget and had to buy a laptop which I could use for gaming and work and I ended up with an Asus RoG. Graphic was a 870, so not terrible for the price.

Also, I have 2 peripherals from logitech: a mouse (g600) and headset (g340) but picked the latter on a sale for half the price at amazon. The sound is good, the mic is meh.

 

[AnOminous]

I hear people shit on Razer a lot, but honestly their prices aren't that much worse than Logitech (or any other "top tier" brand) and I've never known anybody irl have a bad time with them. Their branding is edgy as hell, but there are enough people that swear by Deathadders to show that they're not total shite. I don't use Razer because they're pisstaking cunts, seriously their merch store is INSANE, but I know plenty of people happily using Razer mice.

Razer mice are perfectly fine, edgy names or not. Currently, I just use an Apple Magic Mouse. The trackpad surface is neat and the multi-touch gestures at least semi-useful, but just in general, it's smooth and useful, and much less painful than the horrible Newegg house brand mouse I was using previously. They're absurdly overpriced but I got it for $20 on eBay, which is a reasonable price for it.

It's reasonably good for gaming, but not for some complicated FPS where you want to use customized controls, multiple buttons and other things. The multi-touch gestures are slightly awkward for rapid use.

 

[c-no]

Yes. That's another pet hate of mine - "gaming RAM." With stupid sized heatsinks dangling off of them and allegedly higher frequencies and belt-hitching names like "Vengeance" and "Dominator" and "G.SKILL Ripjaws" yet there's literally no difference in performance unless you're overclocking massively. But it costs twice as much.

RAM will always be RAM and having those heatsinks, I remember they more or less are useless outside of aesthetics. I'm not too well versed in RAM outside of knowing you have things like CAS and that DDR3 has 1660 while DDR4 has 3000. Speaking of "cost twice as much", having more RAM is pretty much useless outside of 8 gigs unless one built a workstation mean't for things like video editing and 3D modelling.

 

[Keine]

RAM will always be RAM and having those heatsinks, I remember they more or less are useless outside of aesthetics. I'm not too well versed in RAM outside of knowing you have things like CAS and that DDR3 has 1660 while DDR4 has 3000. Speaking of "cost twice as much", having more RAM is pretty much useless outside of 8 gigs unless one built a workstation mean't for things like video editing and 3D modelling.

RAM usage in games has been slowly creeping up now that 64-bit apps as the norm are becoming a thing.

I have 24GB in my machine mostly because it was $60 for 16GB and I felt like filling up all of my slots. I figured it wouldn't hurt to have some extra just in case.

The thing about gaming stuff by and large is that gamers are largely who enthusiast PC stuff is aimed at, so sometimes it's hard to avoid getting stuff loaded with LEDs and useless design choices when you're trying to just good quality hardware. I think it's fair to say that people often want something to "look" as valuable as it costs too.

 

[XYZpdq]

I have 16gigs of ram in my laptop because it's the only thing I could upgrade.

 

[Club Sandwich]

MSI/Asus, Kingston, Intel, and nVidia has always seen me through so i still use them. cases i generally just fabricate/paint them myself from sheet steel and aluminum panels. Gigabyte was hot when i still used AMD products. i think i have a SiS/Soyo kicking around somewhere...

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

The only thing I can think of that would warrant this shit would be the keyboard, and that's because why not include extra shit when your splurging on mx reds and anti-ghosting.