I can’t recall the last time I had a PC around. It was probably around nearly 20 years ago when I first started working. My brother and I switched over to consoles after deciding that chasing the upgrade path of PC technology was too expensive with poor yields (kinda like trying to mine Bitcoin at home with today’s electricity rates).

Picture of a Sony PS2 Console

The last machine I had back then was probably a Pentium? And with one of my earlier paychecks went into a Sony PlayStation 2, and yes, it was modded to play pirated games. And boy did we play the heck out of that console. Burnout Revenge, Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Street Fighter… let’s just say we got our money’s worth out of the machine.

To answer your question on what kind of PC games that I was playing all this while, well, anything that could run on a Macbook Pro with integrated graphics. For anything else, there were the consoles.

Box shot of a PS4 Pro console

We never looked back since. We gotten the PlayStation 3 just some time after it launched, and the trend continued after we got married to our spouses with the PlayStation 4 gracing our homes. This last generation of consoles however got me noticing that the consoles themselves (at least in this generation), do not age well, with both Sony and Microsoft having to release more powerful, mid-life iterations such as the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

In fact, I realized that these consoles are starting to mimic the lifespan of the more PC-like hardware that they have adopted. Both the PS4 and Xbox One have more in common with their PC brethren than you think, with processors in the form of AMD’s Jaguar APUs. So it’s no wonder they are in need of upgrades, and that’s what PC gamers are accustomed to throughout the years.

Which brings me to the now. I recently commissioned a PC to be built, having snagged a really humongous ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1070 OC Edition graphics card for a song (it was part of a mining rig). I needed a development PC anyways as my main work rig doesn’t cope really well running both Mac OS X and Windows at the same time.

Picture of the new PC build, with the AMD processor, the ASUS ROG 1070 graphics cards and a lot of RAM.

The rest of the build consists of the following:

I think this is pretty much a future proof build, with options for expansion. Definitely cheaper than paying for a PlayStation 5, and the 1070 still has plenty of legs left for gaming at 1080p.

Screenshot of Starcraft 2

Coming back to PC gaming after to many years, I must admit it is hard to resist the temptation to run some older, previously run-on-console/Mac titles, on the PC, and this includes titles such as Fallout 4, Diablo III, and StarCraft II. I’m happy to say that they look so amazing (and it’s good to finally aim with a mouse). It’s an awesome time for PC gaming.