So my PC had been dying a slow death for the last year or so. Of course, it is right around five years old so that isn’t entirely unexpected. Of late my ram mysteriously halved, it is taking longer to boot up, the fan is starting to make a whiny noise, and worse of all it was below specs to play Champions Online.
So I bought a laptop today.
Okay, there was actually a fair amount of thought put into doing this. For starters I looked at the price of parting out a new PC and the pain of assembling it (done so many times in the past, I have the scars on my fingers from getting sliced in the process to prove it). After doing that I looked into getting an Alienware desktop (expensive, but likely worth it (though the idea of it being ‘worth it’ might just be the bragging rights on the insane specs it would have)). But most of my options would involve shipping and time to assemble and really I just wanted a new PC now.
So I bought a laptop.
It actually turned out to be a hell of a lot cheaper than I expected (honestly, a bit less than half of what I had been prepared to spend) but it still specs out to be a pretty nice gaming rig. Not the high-end insane beast of a PC I was looking at from Alienware (which would cost almost 7x what I spent on this) but a good gaming machine that should play pretty much any game out on the market right now and look damned good doing it.
Or, to put it another way, it can run Champions Online with all of the graphics settings turn all the way up.
Took me about two hours after getting it hope to get everything patched and updated. Took me another hour to get CO to download and install. Meanwhile the laptop was running very quietly, and while it blew a lot of hot air out of it’s cooling vent it itself didn’t get anywhere near as hot as laptops I have used in the past (such as the mac book I remember using once which would have melted the skin off of your legs and sterlized you permanently if you actually tried to hold it in your lap).
After having played the game at the minimum graphics settings for the last few days the changes are… Well… I don’t want to say orgasmic but… You know… Suddenly the whole world was brighter (except where the process rendered shadows made it darker), everything had more texture to it and you could see the cloth in peoples costumes wrinkle and flex as they moved, when stuff blew up there was bits flying everywhere, it was like playing a whole new game.
Made a new character with ice powers to play around with the character creator now that I could actually see what I was doing in it (before a lot of it was just flat-toned blurs) and the details on things in it is very impressive. Took screenshots of my various characters I had already made to show off and picked a couple shots from what I was playing tonight (choose two that weren’t too busy with explosions and debris to see the details of the landscape) to display how pretty the game is.
Didn’t do much with my ice guy as I teamed up with @Bllurr again to go through the Crisis in Canada missions. Have to say that while I think the Canada zone might be better looking the missions aren’t as fully fleshed out. When you finish in the Desert you get a cut scene of being welcomed on your survival of the mission but there didn’t seem to be a similar experience in Canada. Plus, the boss fight just felt a lot weaker than the Desert one (though that may have been because our two characters togethor put out a ton of damage very fast). Still, it was a lot of fun to team up for a bit and nice to see the Canada zone proper at last.
About to crash for the night, but here are the screenshots:
