Lukewarm: Revisited

My old friend, Lukewarm-PC, was merrily built back in '14. Since then, she has seen a slew of upgrades; some out of niceties and some out of necessities. Lukewarm is now packed with:

• an aftermarket Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo heatsink
• overclocked a generous 800Mhz to a whopping 4.0GHz
• an Nvidia GeForce Palit GTX 950 2GB GDDR5 graphics card
• an additional 4GB stick of RAM bringing the total to 8GBs of RAM
• a green Cooler Master Sickle Flow X illuminating the front of the case and bringing down temps
• 2x20cm strips of Green LEDs garnished on the top and the bottom of the case, visible through the side panel

Pictures will be added soon to accompany the outlandish claims set forth above, when I find the free time and the willpower. Also interesting to note that the total upgrades now collectively weight in at around RM800. Hope you guys are having a great day.

Benchmarks were also carried out, revealing pleasant results.

• Cinnebench =
• Unigine Heaven =
• Passmark Performance Test 8 =
• Counter Strike: Global Offensive =

Before and after! Yes, I know, the picture isn't clear but I'm too lazy to retake it.

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image section, use figure

Minimum Specs for Budget $400 Gaming PC

I tend to use PCPartPicker a lot. I often see builds which have an astronomically high price point, most around the $1000 range. The side effect of this is some kind of subtle elitism shows up, and a gaming PC is not a gaming PC if it doesn't cost more than $x for example. In this post, I will attempt to shed light on the bare minimum you need to build gaming PC without breaking the bank.

First of, why even bother building a PC? Other sites have tackled this issue so I won't go into that. There are three major components in a PC that will seriously have effect on the performance of your PC in games and out of them. That being the Central Processing Unit(CPU), Memory(RAM) and Graphics Card(GPU).

For Memory, the minimum you need is 4GB RAM. However, as of 2015, several AAA games have started pushing for a minimum of 6GB RAM for games. To name some, Advanced Warfare, Dying Light and DragonAge Inquisition. Despite this, you can still play all pre-2015 games with 4GB of RAM.

It gets a bit tricky now. You can go two ways, the INTEGRATED and DEDICATED.

• Integrated means that the graphics card is inside the CPU itself.
• Dedicated means that the graphics card has its own hardware and is not inside the CPU.

A quick rule of the thumb is to either get a dual-core Intel or a quad-core AMD. I am not being an Intel fanboy here but it is proven that Intel has stronger single-thread performance. If you go the Integrated route, you need to get a AMD APU or an i3. Do not get an AMD A4 or A6 because it is a dual-core AMD processor which is well, slow. You need to get a A8 or A10 APU such as the A8-7600 or an A10-7800 which is the flagship of the APU line. As for the i3, you could get the i3-4160 (3.6GHZ, Intel HD 4400) or the i3-4360(3.7GHZ, Intel HD 4600. From a budget perspective, upgrading to an i5 or i7 is pointless as the integrated graphics stays the same (HD 4600). The primary difference between the two is that the HD4600 is stronger and trades blows with AMD's A8 APUs. If you are planning on not getting a dedicated GPU, do not even think about using the graphics in a Pentium or Celeron for gaming, normally referred to as Intel HD Graphics Family. They just cannot cope with games.

The dedicated route on the other hand means that you will get a better graphics card at the expense of a weaker CPU. For AMD, you need to find AMD Athlon X4 7XXK or 8XXK such as the X4 760K or X4 860K. The Athlon boasts four threads with no integrated graphics card. For all intents and purposes, the X4 line is exactly the same as the newer FX 4300 line, with the only difference is that the FX4300s are more expensive and use a different socket. For Intel, you would want to get a dual-core Pentium G3XXX such as the G3220(3.20GHZ, Hashwell architecture) or a Celeron G18XX such as the G1820(2.8GHZ, Hashwell architecture) The main difference between the Pentium and Celeron are higher clock rates and a bit more of CPU cache. As for the graphics, the minimum you want to get is either a AMD R7 250 GDDR5 or a Nvidia GT 730 64-bit GDDR5

And there you have it! A barebones gaming PC. I have made a few sample builds for you to check out just so you get an idea of what I'm going on about:

• AMD Integrated Gaming PC This PC should be able to sustain 30fps using high on some games and medium/low settings on 720p in other games.
• Intel Dedicated Gaming PC This PC should be able to sustain 30fps using high on some games and medium/low settings on 720p in other games.

As a side note, do not get the Intel Pentium J2900 or Celeron J1900 which come soldered along a motherboard. Those are low power CPUs meant to act as passively cooled(that's a fancy way of saying it has no fans) low-power HTPCs. Personally, I have a Pentium G3258 and R7 250 and I can play on high in Far Cry 4, medium in Advanced Warfare with around 30 to 40 fps. Please note that certain games have a dual-core lock that do not allow dual-core CPUs to play. This can be easily bypassed with a few mods though.

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Operating Systems: Windows, MacOS and Linux

The good old Operating System. I realize many of you do not even know what is an Operating System, but you do know you have Windows on your PCs. This post will mainly address the three most popular type of Desktop Operating Systems(OS), instead of more mobile oriented versions such as iOS, Windows Phone or Android. What you probably need to know is that iOS is owned by Apple which develops MacOS, Windows Phone by Microsoft which develops Windows and Android by Google which is based of the free Linux/GNU kernel.
An Operating System is basically a layer of software you use on your hardware so that your PC which was previously just a big brick becomes a slightly more functional brick.(joke) It is the software to the hardware, doorknob to the door so to speak. It allows you to actually use your PC without much thought. Without an Operating System, the only thing you will be able to access on your PC is your BIOS. No, that isn't a plant-based fuel. So, an Operating System turn out to be pretty nifty after all, right?
There are three major desktop OSes that are being used today. That being Windows, Macintosh, and the Linux which is usually the vocal minority. of the three. They make that less than 1 percent market-share seem like 15 percent market-share. At least. You can find the explanation of each Operating System in their Wikipedia articles, which I have conveniently placed for you here: Windows, MacOS, and Linux
I could read those Wikipedia articles and watch a few YouTube videos on the matter and then paraphrase everything I understood. But I'm not going to do that. I'll summarize whatever knowledge I have in the table below, succinctly(but with no guarantee over accuracy). Feel free to let me know of any errors down in the comments. In regards to the comments, I have enabled Anonymous commenting, so you won't have to go through the hassle of creating an account in order to comment.
On another note though, the entire article was written in HTML5 using Notepad++ instead of Blogger's editor. This was some kind of pseudo-exercise for me, to see whether I could actually recall and use whatever I had been learning from Codecademy. Also, the table that I spoke of!

All Operating Systems
Description	Windows	Mac OS	Linux
Based on	MS-DOS	UNIX	UNIX
Year of Origin	1983	1984	1991
Versions	Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10	Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan	Multiple: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE
Developer	Microsoft	Apple	Multiple: Canonical, Linux Mint Team, Red Hat, Debian Project, OpenSUSE Project
Known for	Ease of use. Users grow up on Windows as their primary OS. Viruses. Viruses target Windows with 94% of market share. Bloatware. 99% of PC Manufacturers install Windows on their respective PCs for sale.	Premium Feel. No matter what you say, Products made by Apple will always be, in Public perception of course; better than anything else. The sheer price of an Apple product solidifies this view. Digital Producer Haven. If you are a digital producer, be it audio or video; Apple probably has more professional products geared towards you.	Wrong public perception. Everyone who has never used Linux tends to think it is difficult to use. They are only 50 percent right, though. For an everyday user, popular distributions such as Linux Mint and Ubuntu will perform accordingly. Things only start to go technical once you aim to troubleshoot your PC. Weak market share. With under 1 percent market share, Linux fails to win Desktop users' hearts. They perform much better in other segments though, such as supercomputers and servers.

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Welcome!

 

At the moment, I am trying to make the mobile version of this site nice.. It's harder than expected unfortunately...

There's an ugly brown box that halves the screen that you should notice if you browse using your smartphone. Also, this first post will be rather nonsensical and pointless... just to see whether that black box realigns itself when I add some text into it.

By, the way make sure you check out codecademy.com . I learned most of what I know from there. Check it out, it's a good site. #Codecademy

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Here's my Linux Mint 17.3 installation! It's pretty fucking cool when you go terminal only, mind you.