It used to be easy to build a PC that was double the performance of a console for the same price. And it was even easier if you sourced slightly used current hardware. Now you’re lucky to get last gen hardware for a decent price used. The market is garbage.

Back in 2014 you could get brand new motherboards for ~$50, where it’s difficult to find any under $150 that provide decent features. I think the most expensive thing at the time was NAND due to flooded factories but everything else was super cheap.

It was removable, but used Dells weird connection. I just had to solder the connections of the new battery on instead of paying Dell $20 for a watch battery haha.

I had one of the Alienware Alphas with the 860m and desktop haswell 4130t. You could swap in a 4160 but your big enemy would be heat.

I swapped the steam OS for windows and threw in some cheap 240gb adata ssd. Ran it for years.

Only problem was the cmos battery would fail every now and again and I’d have to solder a new one in because Dell……

Anyways, I was in it ~$400 and it was a great htpc. Only real problem was haswell couldn’t decode 4k YouTube.

The steam controller I still have, and it’s quirky. But I like it for the mouse function.

I thought the steam deck already had this. Admittedly, I’ve only had mine for about a month, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it charge to 100%. I think 95% was the highest I’ve seen. It seemed like it had something similar to smart charge like Windows has.

They’re features, not bugs in Bethesda games.

I’ll take it if that means companies start optimizing their games better.

The combat is just generally unintuitive. Which early in the game is frustrating. And if you’re like me and spend weeks between sessions you can forget all the timing and buttons you need to press.

If the combat is frustrating, turn the difficulty down. There will still be a learning curve, but it’ll be the difference between surviving and having to do an hour of work again because you forgot to quick save and get slapped by a foglet.

Just don’t bother with a 13th/14th gen intel right now. Either go 12th gen intel, or straight up AMD which is what I’d recommend.

Source

Take a look at Keychron. They have a lot to offer for around your budget and they go on sale frequently.

Are you looking to be able to swap switches out? If so you will need to find hot swappable switches.

If you care about backlighting they might be a little more expensive. But Keychron is reasonable. I’ve had their K2 for years and it has a better feel in it vs Corsair or Razer stuff in my opinion.

Anything mini led with local dimming and HDR will be more than enough at a lower budget. Hisense has some pretty nice ones.

Check out rtings to get a general idea of features and their usefulness.

Congrats!

At this point I’d just say enjoy the new build.

Easy first steps. Enable the XMP profile in the bios to get the most out of your ram since ryzen is very sensitive to that.

Otherwise, I’d leave it as-is. Maybe grab 3DMark on sale ($5 or so) from steam and bench your system just to make sure you’re within expected results compared to others.

PBO for the cpu pretty much gets you 90% there on your max cpu overclock plus a little more voltage than you’d have with a manual one. The X3D cpus are really thick with the stacked cache so they do require decent cooling compared to non X3D skus. So it may just run a little warm but nothing crazy.

The big thing these days for gpu’s is undervolting. I’ve been able to cut out 50w or so from my 3080 with no discernible performance hit when coupled with my 5600x. Check out the Optimum YouTube channel (formerly Optimum Tech) on his undervolting results. His videos are a little older but are applicable to most gpus that are power hungry.

My bad. It just seems like the low hanging fruit everyone plays off of.

We actually used to get vehicles close to this size. The Suzuki samurai (really a jimny) was sold here for a number of years. Geo sold a fair number of almost kei cars that Suzuki made.

I’m a fan of limiting them from interstate highways, but keeping them registrable. It’s just dumb they cite “safety” even though the law explicitly calls out they aren’t required to be safe. I just want a nice 25-45 mph city truck to lug dirty junk around.

But if anyone is curious, Douglas deBoard imported so many European cars in the 80’s that cut into the profits of Mercedes USA enough that they pushed the law through. Buying them in Europe and importing them was actually cheaper (in some aspects) than buying a US market one. And the imported cars were better equipped!

It wasn’t even about protecting American manufacturers or trucks. Mercedes has just always been a huge dick.

Doing comparisons like these don’t make sense when motorcycles and trikes exist.

Scale for these is sometimes hard to give in pictures. Their use case is also important, as generally, you’re not typing a novel with these.

I would assume the latter until proven otherwise. No doubt they hide that.

That FX-8350 is the problem.

That’s super cool!

Are engine block heaters being confused for pre-heating the cabin? Because we have block heaters too.

The peak version of this that’s kind of sold me is you can pre-condition in the garage. Like, why wouldn’t anyone want to do that.