Humanoid

More co-op filler. - No Man's Sky. Loaded into the starting planet. Froze to death while trying to figure out the UI. Got bored walking several minutes to do tutorial fetch quest. Moving on... - Monster Hunter World. Absolutely worthless in co-op because you can't do the story in co-op mode unless you've already done each mission solo. Moving on... - Forza Horizon 3. Irritatingly makes you do an hour or two of solo content before allowing you to go into multiplayer. But it's cute, in a sort of uncanny valley Australia sort of way. Probably worth a few more sessions. One out of three ain't bad I guess?

Holiday time means local co-op time, and this year's titles were two EA games, courtesy of EA Play on Game Pass. Buy Game Pass (TM) today! Ahem. First up was Unravel 2. Gorgeous and adorable little platformer with fun physics, albeit fairly short, and at the end of it I couldn't make heads or tails of what it was meant to be about. I'm sure it was supposed to be something deep and meaningful about the human condition or something but in the end we just ended up scratching our heads. There are a bunch of challenge levels as "extra" content, but we didn't end up doing any past the first couple because of the overly punishing retry penalty - there are no checkpoints in these levels. Second was A Way Out. You've probably heard of the mandatory co-op gimmick of this game, but I can say I'm glad for it, it works out rather well even during the times that one player is doing filler content while the other is experiencing some story sequences. I admit at first I was concerned that the gameplay might be too much of a Telltale-esque QTE-fest, but mercifully that did not end up the case, and the gameplay was fairly varied throughout. Indeed I'd almost say it more resembles Mario Party than The Walking Dead. The storytelling and acting is ...adequate, classic gritty B-movie stuff, and there are some clownshoes contrivances especially towards the end, where it also starts to abandon any pretense of realism by veering into 80s action flick territory. _____________ After all that, I'm back home now, and a couple of days ago I ordered an Xbox Sex direct from Microsoft, who must have had a containerful of them dock in the country as they were, shockingly, in stock for hours. It arrived today, and as I test I fired up Overcooked. Level loading times are 2-3 seconds, an order of magnitude better than on my sister's XboneS. Worth the $750AUD already.

Go for two separate cables instead, it'll be more stable that way. Having multiple connectors for video cards per cable is sort of a compromise for people who run multiple video cards, which isn't something that really happens much these days.

The Dell S2721DGF with relatively frequent discount codes can drop to about 300 quid. Same panel as the LG 27GL850 (LG make the panel), but easier to find discounts on the Dell.

Solid, balanced build. If you have some things to think about: - The case doesn't have a USB-C port. If that would be something useful to you, look to (looking at other mesh type cases) the Corsair 4000D, Phanteks P500A, Fractal Design Meshify S2 (or the newer Meshify 2, but expensive), or be quiet! Pure Base 500DX. - I think the Cooler Master 212 line, while long having been the budget king, is starting to show its age. Of other products in this price range, consider the Arctic Freezer 34 (cheapest), be quiet! Pure Rock 2 (quietest) or Arctic Freezer 34 eSports Duo (best performance). - The Corsair RMx is slightly better than the plain RM and it looks like it can be had cheaper, or at least same price.

X570 has more PCI lanes, but that only matters if you want to run more than one PCI-E NVMe SSD, when a typical PC these days runs none. Generally speaking they just have more of what you already get, more fast USB ports, more SATA (if they choose to configure it to maximise that) ...and also more noise because they have an extra fan cooling the motherboard. Choosing a motherboard is largely down to picking one that has the features you need. Number of slots/ports (be it PCI-E, USB, M.2, SATA, whatever), Wi-Fi/Bluetooth inclusions, Gigabit Ethernet vs 2.5Gbit Ethernet, the quality of the onboard sound chip if you need to use it, Thunderbolt support, LED bling, etc. This tier list is based on US pricing but can give you an idea of what the more well-regarded boards in each price bracket are, plus any notable shortcomings of individual models that may not be immediately obvious, such as missing a USB-C front panel header.

Given the whole console farce, suddenly I find myself rather more amenable to the concept of limited time exclusivity.

It's because those people died after being run over by gigantic cheese wheels.

Thinking back to how I chose the "wrong" Origin in the first Dragon Age game, which coloured my perception of the rest of the game for the worst, I'm thinking of reading at least some light spoilers for each of the prologues before committing to one. I don't know how important the prologue is, but picking one that allows me to stay properly in character feels somewhat important.

Galaxy was a pain for BG3 early access, though I wonder how much of that is Larian's fault. I think I've downloaded the whole ~60GB of that game several times now. Can't say I've had an issue with it for officially released games though. There's work to be done on it of course, but it seems to at least bypass their manual installer problem of needing a large scratch drive to decompress to. It's absurd that after all these years it still just uses the default temp drive instead of prompting for a location when we're dealing with nearly 100GB of temporary space needed.

Got my copy today, and after a false start (where I thought Galaxy was downloading it, only for it to turn out to be a 60GB BG3 "patch"), I tried out character creation and tested out game performance by running around the starting area a bit. At 1440p and the low preset, my 6700K + 290X was getting, oh, about 40fps. Remembered afterwards that I always run my GPU at -33% power limit, so a quick test at full power yielded another ~10fps (and also another ~10°C). So not great, but there will be a gap next year from when I get back from holidays to when I finally build my new PC, and I think it'd be tolerable. Can't comment about the gameplay obviously but the character creation seemed about the right amount of complexity. Nothing too stupidly detailed, and no precision sliders to mess around with. The UI to handle all this isn't very impressive though, pretty cumbersome all around both to change things and also just to do something as simple as rotate the character model. Was also getting a weird glitch where if I held the rotate key down for more than a second or so, the item selection would snap back up to the top setting (the voice), so I had to rotate in bursts. Kinda ridiculous.

My copy's still in the mail, but not too hung up about it since I'll be away from home for the holiday period and don't really feel like starting then having to immediately take an extended break. But I might install and fire up character creation I guess? Or is it one of those games where character creation is integrated into the plot as opposed to being the very first thing you do?

Good guy Europe providing free medical diagnoses to Americans who could not otherwise afford it. In all seriousness, it's fortunate for both CDPR and their customers that this was caught while there are only a few hundred people playing the game, as opposed to tomorrow when there will be tens of millions doing so. I'm not particularly sensitive to any special effects in any sort of media, which made it all the more surprising that the Source engine* has turned out to be the only thing to induce problems (in this case pretty bad motion sickness) in me, in any video game. * I did see some footage of HL1 or one of its spinoffs that caused issues too, but I can't classify that as having played a game. Still interesting that even poor quality YouTube video doesn't affect the effect though.

^ I had to uninstall FreeCell from my phone a few months back because it was ruining my life. FreeCell instead of sleeping, FreeCell instead of working, FreeCell instead of eating, etc, etc. These days I'm playing Picross on the phone instead because at least it has a finite amount of content so I find it easier to impose a measure of self-control when playing it. On the PC side, I was saddened to hear that the most anticipated game of the year was delayed once again. Yes, the Iberia expansion to Euro Truck Simulator 2 is now definitively postponed to next year. I spend most of my time in Italy and Southern France so an expansion to an adjacent region is pretty much perfectly suited to me. With that in mind, I finally sprung for the older Beyond the Baltic Sea expansion, which adds Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and a little bit of Russia. It was never a high priority for me due to the region being somewhat isolated: I really dislike driving through the oldest regions of the game - i.e. Central Europe - because of how badly the maps have aged, and to access the Baltics means interacting with the tired old Poland map, which was added with the first DLC way back in 2013. But I grit my teeth and took a job hauling some low value junk from northern Italy to Lithuania, to experience a journey that looks great at both ends but is utterly drab in the middle bit. Oh well, it's not something I'll have to repeat often. Since then I've just been taking short distance jobs wholly self-contained in the new expansion regions. Once I'm sufficiently satisfied with exploring that side of the sea, I'll start taking jobs that take me back across to the Scandinavian map, which despite being the second expansion is actually one that does hold up very well. I think I'll just hang around in the north until I get access to Spain. Some observations: + No toll roads in this region that I've seen, excellent. France is really bad with them. + I'm often allowed to travel at 90km/h again, after being almost permanently shackled to 80 in my regular stomping grounds. - Being that far up north makes the lack of seasons in the game more glaring than elsewhere. It's permanently mid-summer in the game no matter where you are, but seasonal variations in daylight and weather, etc, are more noticeable by their absence up here. - The font on road signs in Finland seem kinda small, and speed limit signs being on a yellow background is weird and harder to read too. Is this a snow thing? Yellow road markings are fine and interesting though. - Kaliningrad sucks. Border controls, weird speed limits, and apparently Russia has these weird roundabouts where vehicles already in the roundabout must yield to vehicles entering it. Like, what? Do you understand the concept of roundabouts, Russia? EDIT: Not my screenshot but here's an example of what they do. Utter madness. At least fuel is about half the price it is anywhere else. P.S. To pre-emptively answer the age-old question of which DLC to buy, I would say the biggest factor is adjacency, and how you can leverage it to avoid Germany. Buy France and Italy, or buy Scandinavia and the Baltics. I don't have the Black Sea expansion and don't intend to buy it just yet because it doesn't fit all that well into the rest of the map due to the ex-Yugoslav countries not being implemented at all.

Nah, neither the refresh or the smouldering husk are big assumptions. Being able to get the 3600 on the cheap is the unrealistic thing here.

There were no FE cards at all in the country so the $688 price point ended up being a complete fiction anyway. I tracked half a dozen stores on launch and the cheapest cards available were $749. The crappy Zotac ones that are comprehensively worse than the FE in every metric, for 10% more than the (purely theoretical) FE. If that doesn't confirm that the MSRP is purely a marketing stunt then I don't know what is. That, incidentally, is the price of the new next-gen consoles here. EDIT: For the sake of comparison, the 6800 has 10.2% extra fat, and the 6800XT 8.7%. So hopefully if AMD match the $399USD price point with one of their as-yet unannounced products, we'll see a similar end result of reference cards going for $660AUD. If they send even literally one reference card down here it'll already have better availability than the 3060Ti.

$688AUD MSRP apparently. Direct currency conversion plus 10% tax lands at just under $600 there's ~15.5% "screw you Australia" margin. This is substantially higher than the 3070 where said margin was only 8.5%. Ick.

It's competent, in that it's about the level of entry level gaming cards being sold today, which is basically the RX 570 or GTX 1650 Super. Certainly keep an eye on the next gen low-midrange cards coming out next year, but it'll do for now especially as there's no great value to be had with the current product lineups of either colour. And yeah, 500W (well, typically they'd be 550W) PSUs will handle your system with ease assuming you don't overclock. The CPU will consume well under 100W, and the graphics card maybe 150W tops - and if you pick up a new mid-range card will probably be 200W max. Even the big 1000EUR video cards are ~250-300W, so yeah.

Glad you got it all sorted though, and if it's any help, I've had those parts (well, the v1, but same deal) in my shopping cart in the past month before I decided to delay my build. The disks aren't something I'd stress about at all, since you can just keep adding more and more over the next several years, and they'll keep getting better, faster, cheaper, etc. In the meantime I had a stickybeak at some amplifier prices after missing out on the little Loxjie one, and maybe it's just as well - Amazon are selling Marantz hi-fi amps at very good prices from the UK, and by good I mean third cheaper than they are locally. I'm not about to drop $800-ish on an amp right now while my money is tied up in building a PC, but in a year or two, sure. It's a fair chunk of change, and costs about as much as an RTX 3070, but something like that could easily last 20+ years. I don't know when it happened, but sometime during the past decade, including a DAC with this kind of mainstream amp had become the norm rather than the exception, and I'm glad for it.

On my own side, I'm unfortunately 1 for 3 in the Black Friday stakes so far. Got the motherboard I was after, but missed out on the monitor and amp. My pick ended up being the MSI B550 Gaming Edge WiFi. Not a huge discount - on the order of 10-15% off the regular price, but acceptable for me. Objectively it's probably overkill as I don't even need the WiFi, which is its only real selling point over the $20-30 cheaper B550 Tomahawk, but I save, uh, $5 on a Bluetooth dongle I guess? And the WiFi is simply a nice-to-have backup for when my regular internet goes down. I had an Asus PCE-AC68 WiFi expansion card spare but I won't have to mess with it now. I had originally intended to go with a Gigabyte board this generation, but they were a bit slow to the party and didn't have what I wanted back when I was doing the research. (Since then the Aorus Pro ax has arrived to match MSI's featureset, but it's a bit late and therefore has ever so slightly worse price and availability, and is also relatively untested in consumer hands) The two misses were the Dell S2721DGF monitor, of which the entire 1000 unit allocation sold out in one minute, and the Loxjie A30 DAC/amp combo unit which evidently sold out a few days ago already. Oh well, both were far from essential, just being upgrades to things that already worked well. Funny then I suppose that despite all my claims of not building the darned thing until next year, I'm only technically a CPU away from having a new bootable PC. The system drive, RAM and video card would be placeholders, but still.

There is no future-proofing to be had because this is the last generation of CPU to use the AM4 socket. Some B450 boards are still awaiting a BIOS update for 5000-series CPU compatibility, but that'll arrive early next year at the latest. Therefore in terms of what hardware each board will support, there is no meaningful difference. That said, there are some "nice-to-have" things in the newer chipset like the new PCI-E 4.0 standard (tiny performance gain for top-end cards) and support for AMD Smart Access Memory (but for now a 5000 series CPU is needed for that). If you shell out for some of the nicer boards you also get access to newer improvements like 2.5Gbit ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 (ax), though check the specs of individual boards to see if they actually feature those. In the end it depends on the price difference somewhat. Personally I'd be happy to pay perhaps $10 more on a budget board for the upgrade. On a mid-range or better board (over 150EUR, say), I'd go B550 all the way. Back when B550 boards first launched, there was a pretty hefty price premium, but that has since narrowed quite a bit. The current value darling of the internet, the Asrock B550M Pro4, is cheaper here than the old favourite MSI B450 Tomahawk Max. Yes I know it's a bit unfair to compare a microATX board to a full-sized one, but those are the boards I most often see recommended for budget-to-midrange builds.

I had a poke around - first at whether the Finns had a version of PCPartPicker. They do ...but it only pulls from one retailer, so absolutely useless. But I did come across a price comparison site and it seems pretty useful. https://hinta.fi/2064274/amd-ryzen-5-5600x Here in Australia I can fairly trivially pick up a 5600X or 5800X in stock right now, no issue at all. So hopefully those green buttons are a good sign for Europe too. EDIT: Hahaah, figures that between the time I used the site and now, they went down for maintenance.

Double the cores is double the speed ...for very specific tasks that can both use that amount of cores, and is able to load them fairly evenly. Unfortunately, none of those tasks are gaming. It's a good price though and unlike the 3600X/XT, there at least is a reason for it to exist. For gaming though, reaching all the way to the 5600X will likely be better value per frame. Put it this way: if you're already paying 70€ more for 5-10% extra performance (going to be a lot closer to 5% for most games), paying a further 40€ for 20+% more performance should be a straightforward decision. That said, the decision between the 3600 and the 5600X might come down to whether you plan to buy a new desk within the next few years.

Without knowing the specific prices, the general consensus is that the 3300X, 3600 non-X and 5600X are the sweet spots. The 3600X and XT don't really give you much more than the regular 3600 does; and the 3700X is often more than the 5600X and therefore is only relevant if you already know you need the extra cores - games will heavily favour the 5600X. Which one is "best" depends on specific pricing as well as your overall budget - i.e. how much would you be sacrificing in other areas if you did go for a more expensive CPU. You can afford the 5600X, but does it mean not being able to fit in (for example) a 3060Ti video card (which is supposedly releasing next week) for example? So while personally I am building a new PC with a 5600X, I would only do so if I could also afford a 3060Ti minimum (supposedly the price will be $400USD). If not, then I would get the regular 3600 instead and use the savings to get a better video card. (AMD's response to the 3060Ti will presumably be the RX 6700 series, but that's probably January at the earliest)

@kirottu 1) The XT CPUs were notoriously bad value when they launched, so I'm not sure what's happening here. Can you link us the store or give us the actual prices so we can tell whether it's the XT being sold off cheap, or the 3600X being overpriced at those places, or whatever else is going on. With "normal" pricing your choice would typically be between the 3600 non-X versus the 5600X. The 3700X might be a shout if it's a good price given that it has two extra cores compared to the 600 series. Or go the other way and get the 3300X, which is common in some countries but rarer than gold in others - probably the pick for a budget system and frees up funds to upgrade graphics. 2) With typical usage patterns in a home setting, any decent SSD would last decades. That said, bigger isn't always cheaper as 1TB is probably the sweet spot in terms of pricing these days. 3) You can still upgrade to Win10 for free even now, no need to keep stuff from back when the offer was initially advertised. On a completely new PC, it's not guaranteed that inputting your old Win7 key would automatically work, but if automatic activation fails, you can usually get it done manually by calling MS's activation number - mostly automated these days. 3b) Even failing all that, Windows 10 is actually still "free-to-use" in that there's no time limit for using an unactivated copy. You will be locked out of some trivial personalisation features, but basically all that means is that you can't change the wallpaper.