I’ve had an odd weekend this weekend.
For one, I was sober, and I haven’t had a night out.
And the second reason: I enjoyed it so much.
The last few weeks, I’ve been going about 150miles per hour with travelling (in the last month I’ve been Cardiff, Bangor, Manchester and Llandudno for Saturday Nights out – not sleeping in my own bed in any of those nights) and work, so it was nice to slow down for a day.
There was one bit of excitement: The Bay vs Burton game I talked about on Friday was on Saturday. We lost 2-1, but we could leave with our heads held high. We played fantastically and hopefully this spurs us on to a nice little league run to leave us around the top of the league where we belong.
Also, I purchased The Orange Box
.
I am looking to upgrade to play TF2 though. Is it worth it though?
Comments: 8 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
The 6 hours or so Portal takes are worth the money alone… I’ve played it through something like 5 times already. HL2 ep2 is also absolutely stunning, both would easily be in my top 10 games. Not tried TF2 yet, so can’t comment on that, out of interest, is it one component (e.g. graphics card) thats letting you down?
Well, looking at my system specs, they say that the graphics card, cpu and ram are inadequate for TF2 and Portal
Well, if you are in any way interested in buying pc bits (sounds like pretty much all of it) it’s never been a better time to buy stuff. You could spend about £400 and have a new PC that would kick ass. You could get something for probably £250 which would play any of the Source engine (Half life 2′s, TF2, portal) beautifully.
Actually, scrap that, you can have a lovely dual core Intel proc which would be plenty for £56, 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM for £35, a nice motherboard for £65 or so (cheaper ones are out there) and a graphics card which beats mine for about £80 (and mine plays these games, as well as Bioshock, unreal tournament 3 etc fine, only struggles slightly with Crysis). So whats that? Yeah, £250 ish. Buy a beer less each time you go out, save up the pennies and you’ll be there in no time
Thing is though I’m not a huge gamer on the PC.
What I’m looking at is this:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?BB-AM366M
and
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-73GS
And then just stick my HD/DVD/Floppy in it.
Hmm, it’s difficult to know. A site I quite like is overclockers.co.uk, but it’s not the cheapest, however, picking out the bits in that barebones PC
Athlon X2 4000+ £41.11
Corsair 1GB RAM £16.44
Asrock motherboard £35.24
Gigabyte PSU £27.01
Which is getting you brand name parts (rather than generic stuff) and a better processor for slightly less (admitedly no case, but you could re-use your current one). I’m sure if you browsed on the site you sent, you could get the same components for less, and then maybe put the £10 or so towards a slightly better graphics card (that is the main thing for games, you could be below min specs on everything else, except RAM maybe, and a nice graphics card, and games would still play wonderfully)
Ok, I’ll stop posting boring PC bits after this, but browsing the site you said
AM2 Athlon 64 4000
£37.33
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?AMD-64M240
1GB PC5400 RAM
£18.57
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?RAM-67/1GB
Gigabyte Motherboard
£33.78
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?GIG-M61SME
Case with 400W PSU
£26.97
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-DAGON
Which is, I’m guessing, the same Case/PSU, RAM and either the same or possibly slightly better Motherboard (there were cheaper), and a better CPU (4000 against 3600), all for about £7 less, which, as I say, should go on the graphics if possible. I think if you could say wait for a month or two and put £45-£50 or so on a graphics card instead, the difference would be pretty big though.
When you gonna inform the other readers about your Mondy night exploits!!! Its all well and good talking about the Bay but if you are gonna run a golden goal and things for the May game you need to inform all about your progress and whats going on!
I heard from some of my friends that TF2 is pretty fun, but they barely play it as they are busy with Unreal 3 and Call of Duty 4.