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• Mid-range gaming rig for a client

 by Stanley, July 22, 2010

One of my clients threw me an RM2000 budget for a personal computer. I’m assembling it for him as a favor. His son will be using it for mostly gaming, no doubt about that. What a person likes in Facebook tells a lot about that person :)

Budget of RM2k for a gaming PC is nothing to shout about. It will only take you far enough for a mid-range gaming rig. At best, you might be able to run Crysis at average settings.

I started off with AMD Athlon II X3 440 and a Gigabyte motherboard. 4GBs of Corsair memory sticks, the normal ones. A 2GB Western Digital Green HDD. 450W Cooler Master PSU. And the most important component in any gaming rig, the graphics card, I went with ATI’s HD5770 with 1GB of DDR5 RAM.

Everything came to a total of slightly over RM2k once I factor in the costs of a cooler, DVD-burner drive, mid-tower casing and other miscellaneous stuff. Mind you that’s for the CPU only without an LCD monitor. He’ll hook this up to an existing 24 inch monitor. You need deep pockets for more serious gaming.

I imagine this setup is good enough for most PC games. And should last him a good three to four years before his next upgrade.

• Websites using white background colours

 July 8, 2010
Are an eyesore, literally. Staring all day at a computer screen is no doubt one of the worst things you can subject your eyes to. But for me, it’s an occupational hazard I have to live with until the day I decide to switch profession. One of the best ways to provide some relief for your eyes [...]
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• Why I’m not interested in Streamyx high-speed broadband internet

 April 6, 2010
Telekom Malaysia launched a couple of high-speed broadband packages two week ago. I didn’t bother to find out much because I’m certain the initial services won’t be rolling out in my area anytime soon. Another reason for my ignorance is I absolutely have zero faith in TM’s “best effort” quality of service. Admittedly, it’s the money [...]
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• OpenOffice 3.2 loads noticeably faster

 January 17, 2010
OpenOffice has been my bread and butter word and spreadsheet editing software since back in version 2.3 days. Loading OpenOffice after booting up the PC, it has always been fairly slow. But that doesn’t really bother me at all as once OO is loaded and cached in memory, it loads quickly thereafter. At the time I’m [...]
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• RAM prices going up

 December 11, 2009
Several of my clients have hold back their RAM purchases. Especially for clients who are on a tight budget. The sweet spot of RAM size nowadays is around 4GB, two sticks of 2GB, but I honestly think they can get 2GB now and wait for prices to drop before getting another 2GB. Unless Photoshopping, video [...]
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• Goodbye Mininova thanks for the happy times

 November 26, 2009
Mininova is no more. It has gone legit and removed all copyright infringing materials. I wager that means more than 75% of torrent links will be removed. Making Mininova’s once thriving repository of torrents a useless torrent site listing content distribution services. In other words, you might as well take Mininova off your bookmarks. I won’t [...]
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• Witnessing SSD do its magic

 November 6, 2009
Yesterday I witnessed first hand how SSD can literally change one’s computing experience. Nothing short of a relevation. I helped a client configure a personal computer from the group up. He wanted middle-of-the-range specs that would handle normal office softwares, non-intensive photo editing and web browsing. For the budget he set aside, I could easily build [...]
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