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As @Diddums has done a nice write-up of his latest PC antics, I thought I'd bring mine up to date.... My PC was always a little shy of power for the games I wanted to play. Annoying stuttering etc was beginning to get me down, and honestly meant I never really played PC games that much. Al that has now changed. I've moved from the 1050ti to a 1060 6gb and the i3-7100 has been replaced by an unlocked i5 7600k. Looking much better on the performance front. As I bought the unlocked version the stock cooler wasn't going to cut it, so I got a nice little closed loop water cooler. I've also moved all my games and stuff from the mechanical HDD to an NVMe 1tb M.2 drive (it's between the CPU and the GPU). This thing is seriously quick. So now I get to play games on settings other than LOW. Nice!

Hi Holly, thanks for your interest in our community. I see you have posted the same link 8 times in an effort to demonstrate just how keen you are to be a part of the best gaming community in the world. In order to return the favour, I have replied to your survey 8 times from differing IP addresses each time and in the spirit of video games, used an RNG script for the answers. I have also edited the link in your post to reflect your enthusiasm. Good luck with the project, I hope it works out well for you

Very nice dude, 2x GTX 980? Very nice! Looking forward to seeing this beast up in action and playing some games with you. If you have any spare parts.....hi 😄

That’s like the inside of an 70’s disco Phil 😂😂

Don't tell him, Pike! Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

If you look at human history, crazy behaviour always happen in times of economic uncertainty. America's President is ample example of that[emoji28] The way we communicate now has just added a multiplier to the craziness but that craziness is just a symptom if something else, and will always be there so long as we live the way we do. In my humble opinion, of course[emoji41] Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Wow, great job didds. I would have stuck my head in the oven by now.

I can't see how the game can recover now - The Division 2 released today and seems a far more stable and well-produced game and this is off the back of a terrible week Anthem has already had with community fury regarding missing features and apparent lies from the developer all the way up to release being discovered. Supposedly a bug accidentally caused 'fun' within the game as items were dropping faster that the normal rate but BioWare patched that out immediately meaning it went back to a mundane grind. There were also reports that item stats are also broken so much so the first rifle you get in the game is actually the most powerful! This on top of the wealth of problems the game currently has and the fundamental issues that exist with the design. Anthem could very well be 2019's answer to Fallout 76!

...an eSport franchise spot in the COD League😂😂😂 Maybe if this was a decade ago and the franchise got its foot in the eSports door then maybe this would seem credible rather than laughable. The brand is in rapid decline, it's mocked as a competitive product, viewership is embarrassingly low and they haven't produced a game that's designed to accommodate this purpose since Black Ops 2. The fact league play arrived 4 months late in BO4 just shows how serious they take this aspect and the $25m fee also demonstrates how money-grabbing they are. Remember when they said the Uplink mode would redefine competitive online gaming... There is money to be had in eSports no doubt but anyone fronting this kind of money whether it be full or a partial investment really needs their heads tested. I can't see COD ever becoming a popular eSport brand and I can't see it ever returning to the presence it once held. Most of the publicity it generates now is negative and Activision have done themselves no favours in tarnishing the series as a whole. There's only a fraction of interested competitive players left too.

Do we have a clan set up in game yet? ________________________________________________ EDIT - FGD - FG Division Clan is available for all here that want to group up. If you want to grab a party up or a quick mission or two, can we try and use the FG Discord subchannel so we can get hold of you quickly - FG Discord Division 2 LFG channel

I've been using my trusty old 2500k with 8gb of DDR3 and and an R9 290 4gb for years. To put this in to some perspective, the R9 290 was bought a few weeks after our first Eurogamer meet and the 2500k a few years before that. It still works fairly well, runs anything and some games quite well, but there are titles out there which are starting to seriously stress the poor 2500k. I overclocked it to 4.4ghz, it's perfectly stable and has run like this for a few weeks with no problems and never going above 62deg. An upgrade has always been in the back of my mind but I've never thought I game enough on PC to justify spending over a grand on new stuff, despite you guys buying me games to get me back in to PC gaming. Star Citizen really hammered home how old this beast it getting and truth be told it sort of soured the taste a bit because I was gifted this awesome game by awesome people and couldn't even join them on it. Nevertheless, I spotted some old gaming PCs lying in my boss' storage at work. They looked lost, forlorn and like they hadn't been touched in years, so I asked what he wanted to do with them. I was told "take them, just wipe the drives" (midget porn? idk). Not knowing what I was getting apart from one very obviously being an Alienware Area 51 and the other an Origin PC, I gladly took them off his hands. Some photos: The Origin PC, cased in a beautiful, if slightly tatty Corsair Obsidian case (this was like a £400 case years ago): The Alienware. This case looks pretty but I can't stand it, where the fuck do I put my feet? Side note: This thing is heavy. I don't mean a little porky, I mean heavy. So that was out instantly, impractical, overweight, old, and nothing on top. A bit like me then. This is where things start to get interesting. I took this photo and only properly studied it a few days later. The keen eyed amongst you will notice a few things: Blue USB ports, so it's USB 3. It's not that old then. Core i7. I wasn't sure of the exact architecture, but I remember when Sandy Bridge came out, Intel changed their sticker so you knew it was a Sandy Bridge from the outside. I never looked in to this one, but Alienware tends to be high spec stuff. Another little detail which I'm sure you're all screaming about by now (I'm such a little tease aren't I?) is that it has two graphics cards: My interest was firmly piqued at this point, and excitement started building a bit. My hopes were for a 2600k, maybe 16gb of DDR3 and a pair of GTX 680s. This however gave me a little taster: Well, I can now confirm, having stripped all this stuff down, that the Alienware had two GTX 980s in SLI, 32gb of DDR4 (!), and a Haswell-E i7 5930k sitting handily under a closed loop water cooler which is OEM but a bit of the ol' scratch'n'sniff revealed it to be an Asetek, which is pretty decent, so I'll be keeping it for now. As you can tell however, this thing is dusty. Like the inside of Susan Boyle's coin purse dusty. This is going to need a load of work. The case is a load of wank so that's going in the bin. The motherboard is also some OEM jobbie but it's made by Foxconn who make tons of good stuff so it can't be that bad. The PSU is a Dell (Dell makes Alienware) 1200w jobbie, but it's amazingly enough 80 Plus gold rated (which apart from Platinum, is the highest quality rating you can get). It's also fully modular and has obviously fed this hungry beast with power for years so it's going to get a clean up and used if it'll fit (it's some weird shape, but looks like it'll work). The Origin contained the i7 2600k I wanted, 16gb of DDR3 and a single GTX 580. The PSU is a Corsair 850w non-modular so this will be plan B. Amazingly, the motherboard in this system is one I lusted after for years: An Asus P8-P67 Pro, which was pretty much the king of the hill when Sandy Bridge (both my i5 2500k and this i7 2600k are Sandy Bridge chips) was launched. The case however, is beautiful. So, time to tear it all to pieces and get to work. The motherboard seems to be a standard ATX form factor so fits perfectly in to the Corsair case. Some of the connections are questionable, such as the audio connector which is slap-bang in the middle of the motherboard so will need a bit of creativity to get it to look neat: The age difference between the case and the motherboard is fairly significant, so there are connections on both which the other doesn't accommodate. The case has Firewire, which by the time the Alienware was made, was consigned to the history books, and the case doesn't have USB3 connectivity whereas the motherboard has the interface for it, so I may need to get creative on that front too. The Haswell E CPU is considerably larger than the Sandy Bridge too: The 5930k has 50% more cores at 6, and the same for threads at 12, and it will clock fairly high so it'll run circles around this 2600k. These aren't pretty sticks, but what we're looking at here are 4x 8gb DDR4 2133mhz sticks of RAM: Aaaand installed: The graphics cards were seriously dirty and needed a bit of extra TLC: Time for a good stripdown for a clean and rebuild: Here's a comparison of before and after: Side note: the build quality of these things is amazing. Props to Nvidia. The SLI bridge is such an odd component, these things are literally fancy plugs and cost a fucking fortune: And installed: And that's where I'm at now. Yes the CPU is installed and no there's no cooler on it as I have no thermal paste so will grab some tomorrow. I might also pull the 980s apart and redo the paste on them too. The CPU is just to prevent the pins getting bent. To give you an idea of how neglected and dirty these components were, here are a few photos: So that's first on the list for tomorrow, then do the thermal paste, clean and install the power supply, sort out the storage and optical drives, give it a last clean and see what she does. I'll probably benchmark my current system so I have a proper comparison in terms of performance. This has been a bit of a road of self-discovery again if I'm honest, due to various personal reasons I sort of lost my soul for a few years and had zero inspiration to do anything, so I just sort of drank a lot and played loads of video games. Now in my new job, having weekends off, having less debt and being able to afford things again, I can feel my soul coming back and this little session this afternoon has shown me again how much I love this stuff. Really looking forward to carrying on tomorrow Cheerio!

Looks ace Philly, liking the sound of Hackney in the background too

There you go @Diddums My new set up: New CPU: i7 8700K 4.4Ghz New Ram: HyperX Predator DDR4 RGB Cooling: Corsair H100i Pro PSU: Corsair RM1000x Case: Coolermaster MC500 Mobo: ASUS ROG Strix Z390-H All I have left from the previous build are the two SSDs and the glorous Nvidia MSI GTX 1080ti. Grainy footage below 20190318_162659_2.mp4

That at least is true and getting dumber by the day, just scrolling through Twitter proves that. For all the good and great achievements of the human race the more populated the planet the more of a fail it's become. No matter race, outdated ideology ,political stance, religion, sex or gender they're all to blame and all as bad as each other. People need to live they're own life peacefully and not worry about what others are doing.

The racism and demonisation of muslims (or indeed anyone different who can be used as scapegoat) by the mass media and by shitheads online operating under the guise of "free speech". Your Milos, Paul Joseph Watsons, Stephen 'Tommeh Robinson' Yaxley Lennons, Sargon of Akkads etc etc etc. Your Daily Mail, your Sun, your Express, etc etc lying on their front pages and then printing retractions in small text on page 30 after the damage has been done. Add the vicious economic system we live in, where economic insecurity pits human versus human. Our society is extreme and is corrupt and it's hypocritical and it's just plain dumb. Happy Mondays[emoji106] Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

You can still join (FGD) but you will be playing on eu servers which may cause you some issues with PvP in the dark zone it's your call dude Via the FG App

Great to hear your desire is back in something like this mate. You've always had the knowledge for this and it's cool seeing the progress in your post. Looking forward to seeing the finished product.

Nice start to the project Dave [emoji106] Via the FG App

I may start up another ark server in the near future will keep you guys posted Via the FG App

Very neat Dave. Excited to play a game with you again in the future.

I have seriously enjoyed anthem, four javelins to choose from with more coming soon. I can be a crazed melee master or a damage mitigation sponge and a death dealing ball of explosions all in one sitting, if that doesn't get the proverbial juices flowing I don't know what will. Yeah sure it's had it's issue but what game hasn't the division is having issues with ability deployment and cooldown timers Via the FG App

I'm genuinely intrigued to see what it'll do when it's complete. Although the tech is getting on a bit it was all seriously high end kit when it was released so should still compete with mid to high end kit nowadays. 2x980 seems to be on par with a 2080ti, but this is obviously very driver dependent. Even Nvidia and AMD have given up on multi-gpu stuff as it's a complete clusterfuck for drivers and generally needs a lot of spoon feeding to keep it running smoothly, rendering it pointless for all but the enthusiasts.

Awesome write up. Great little project. Keep it up[emoji8][emoji8][emoji846] Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

The One-77 is so much faster, I squeezed in a few laps and got a 1:44.648. Probably could have gone a little faster but didn’t have time to do more laps. I’ll try to post a new combo later but might be tomorrow.

A couple in quite happy with as im a complete noob