Gaming PC

It’s an Acer Nitro N50-640-UR12 Gaming Desktop from Memory Express. It’s now Ian’s bundle of joy.

This has been a long, slow burn that flared up this weekend. For a long time, Ian has discussed with me the differences between Macs (lots of those around here) and Windows PCs (none to be found, but his friends have them. There have been times through COVID in particular when he wanted to play games with his friends, but the game either wasn’t available for Macs, or his MacBook couldn’t run it fast enough. He’s been playing the Xbox game “Sea of Thieves” and Minecraft with Josh, but there have been other games that he couldn’t play with Joey (Windows/PlayStation) or Josh and Joey would play without Ian.

This came up again on Saturday. Joey had this new game Astroneer that he wanted to play with Ian. Ian bought the game for Xbox and then spent hours trying to get it to work to find out that the Steam version that Joey had wouldn’t cross-play with Xbox. There were cheaper/easier ways to solve this problem (Joey could buy the game for Windows instead of Steam, an extra $45) but I put the bug in Ian’s ear that he could spend some of his “dragon hoard” on this. Ian’s never really been much of a “spender” and Christmas and birthday money had been saved more than spent. I offered that we could pay for half, if that’s what he wanted. Right now, the shortages from COVID have started to abate, and you can get half-decent computers at reasonable prices.

He talked it over with his friends. They were pretty excited about it, and so we went to Memory Express on Sunday afternoon and picked up this system. It’s got a decent graphics card (RTX 3060) and CPU, memory and storage. And it’s got a cool look. Ian’s keyboard, mouse and headset all fit right in.

My angle on this:

• Ian’s going to be the “owner” of this computer. He’s going to have to figure out how it works and fix problems as they arise.
• He’s going to get a chance to work with Windows, which he’ll need at some point, I’m sure.
• He can run Adobe Creative Cloud on it for his multimedia class at school, and it should perform just great.
• He only ever uses his laptop on his desk anyways. When it comes to going to university, we can figure something out. Miranda’s doing well with her iPad for note-taking along with her MacBook for banging out her reports and such.

I’m cautiously optimistic about this. Also, the Samsung monitor continues to have a useful life!

Updated

Yesterday, I got Ian to run GeekBench 5 on his PC. The CPU performance is very comparable to an Apple M1, but it’s the graphics card that really sets it apart. The absolute fastest cards on the market have scores around 200,000, but that’s overkill. This is well into the midrange gaming (or bitcoin mining) territory.