Last week was Amazon Prime Day so I treated myself to a second hand graphics card from Ebay.

My current gaming PC is a bit of a Frankenstein machine I’ve cobbled together from various places; an i7-4790 processor with 32GB DDR3 RAM (4 X 8GB sticks I’ve collected over the years), a collection of SSD and HDD disks (none of them larger than 1TB), and a Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB.

While the best thing I could do is call it quits and start afresh with a new build, where would the fun in that be? Upgrading the processor would require a new motherboard and a new motherboard would need new DDR4 or DDR5 memory. Upgrading to a new graphics card would require a new power supply as my current one only has a 6 pin connector, not 8 as newer generations require.

I have been on the lookout for an older graphics card which uses a 6 pin power connector, or even draws its power from the PCI connector. While the GTX 1060 is a good card, the 3GB was beginning to be a limiting factor. Plus there were a number of games which in theory should run but didn’t. As I use Linux for gaming I’m never sure if it’s my setup that’s the problem or a limitation of the compatibility layers. Sites like ProtonDB are useful to see what is possible with your games library.

I finally came across a RTX 3050 8GB on Ebay and put in a cheeky bid and surprisingly I won (or maybe it’s a sign no one wants these anymore). A few days later it arrived and a simple card swap later I was up and running. A lot of the games which refused to run before now work perfectly and at 60fps on high settings. There is still occasionally a little stuttering which is probably the CPU bottlenecking but it isn’t enough to ruin the experience.

But wait, there is more…

Naively I assumed a better GPU would help game loading times, but obviously it didn’t. Then I had a light bulb moment and realised moving my games library from HDD to SSD might make a difference. After shuffling some data around and moving my games to SSD, I was blown away by the difference. Games like Doom (2016) and GTA IV used to take 4 or 5 minutes to load but now load in seconds.

With great power comes… boredom

So now I have a great gaming PC (by my standards) and access to lots of great games, in fact more games than I have time to play. But I feel like there is something missing. It’s as if it’s the tracking down the components, the building, the configuring and extracting the last ounce of performance I enjoy more than actually playing the games. Maybe it’s time to start shopping for a suitable base for a new Frankenstein PC I can spend the next 5 years tweaking.

And Finally…

This week I have also…

🎧 Listened to: Black Sabbath
🍿 Watched: Bosch: Legacy