https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/2075800/STAR_WARS_Zero_Company

Coming soon, it's like X com for Star Wars.

Currently EA sale too!

keev, I saw you put Deliver Us Mars on your wishlist. I happen to have an unused key for it. If you want it, it's yours!

Diablo 2 Resurrected's art design is very impressive, I'm not sure if they made sound effects better but if not, considerably better than I remembered. Click G and you see legacy look; 800x600 of course but it's like negatives jaggies haha. My friend was right that auto pick up is nice but increased radius would have been better, I miss the Imp from Sacred 2 that you can send home and stash items; a further improvement (in game upgrade) would have been ability to sell off loot, buy stuff in town and even finish quests so you can basically be in the wild almost all the time. Some nostalgia of course but it has a really nice atmosphere, I find myself wanting to listen to the dialogue than rush through game (good sign for the game and my current break).

Blizzard Spring sale! I got Diablo 2 Resurrected, let's see how few of my friends want to get it.
I got a friend who is still in university and pays for living through stock market; he still pirated it lol

Going to get a vaccine bomb soon. Really creepy to read how many viruses and bacteria there really are :D

Ugh.. A friend recommended Frame work laptop if I wanted build quality but not MacOS. You can even add Linux instead of Windows which he recommended anyway for web dev work. Pricey though $1500 for pre built but it's probably worth it. Spare parts and probably good customer service.

I see, thanks!

I think this motherboard only has two slots to begin with (unless I upgrade to the one with 4 slots without using them), and the sticks will come pre-installed. But thanks for the advice!

In slots 1 and 3 * stupid phone

Dual channel is what you should go for. DC means that paired RAM is used equally and as a whole, rather than as separate pieces of memory. 4x would give you 2 x DC, so it would be like two separate memory pieces. That is more useful for high memory apps like video editing and what not, but for gaming you should target DC only, where the DC performance benefits are more important.

Also check your motherboard on how to place it correctly, on most MBs it is in slows 1 and 3 rather than 1 and 2.

@Ele: Is dual channel superior to 4x? Or do you mean, in order to save money? I thought having a motherboard with 4 slots might be useful if I have to upgrade in the future, but then again, 32 GB is probably all I'll ever need for the next decade? Does it make sense though to go for 32 GB instead of 16 GB? Or is it exaggerated for someone like me? I just notice that many games already recommend 32 GB (but then again, I don't play in 4k etc.).

Clair seems fun.

Yas, it's on the list to play, so many damn games! :D

Instead of buying another remaster, consider playing Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, because it just may be one of the pretenders to GOTY 2025.

The game is also in gamepass.

For memory get dual channel not 4x. So get something like 2x16.

After watching a few streams, nostalgia hits hard and I'm at peace with the jankyness of certain added stuff (running animations, mostly). So Oblivion Remaster will likely be my follow-up to KCD2.

I thought I found the right laptop, Honor magic book but of course no Swedish layout shipped to Sweden. I like their ultra slim art model series but overall basically macbook build but windows and better price.

I would pick Asus simply because it's a known brand.

Both are 80+ certified Gold.

Better 750 Watt ASUS PRIME Gold AP-750G? That would be about the same price.

A520 chipset is entry-level and lacks PCIe 4.0 support for the CPU and M.2 slots (it’s limited to PCIe 3.0). There's M2 adapters though. I didn't know about the PCIe limitation but if you won't upgrade the CPU to a 4.0 dependent then it's fine, adapter can be added later.

Somewhat overkill on PSU, I don't recognise that brand. I suppose it's pre built but it's better to pick known reliable brand but lower watt with 80+ certification Bronze or Gold.

Any obvious flaws in this setup?

AMD Ryzen 5 5500 (6* 3600 MHz)
Deepcool cooler
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060
ASUS PRIME A520M-A II/CSM
32 GB DDR4-RAM (4*8 GB)
500 GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD Kingston NV2
4000 GB SATA hard drive
CSL Red black (max. GPU length: 32 cm)
850 watt BoostBoxx Power Boost

What would be some of the more demanding games of the current generation? Besides Indy?

Anyone heard anything of Blue Prince? Notch called it a masterpiece. Apparently a genre mix, art design is quite nice.

That's good!

Fenix, smart feature but it seems better if you could just charge on planes which some offer, fairly common nowadays.

AMD Ryzen 5 5500
Deepcool cooler
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060
MSI A520M-A Pro
16 GB DDR4-RAM
500 GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD Kingston NV2
No drive
no Cardreader
CSL Spectrum
500 watt CSL
No WiFi
24 months manufacturer warranty
onBoard LAN
onBoard HD Sound
No ultra-silent kit

What do you guys think of this setup, if I add Windows and maybe a 4GB SATA HDD, keeping in mind that my old PC was budget, too, but lasted me about 10 years (maybe 6 or 7 without GPU update, I think itt was a GTX750 in 2015), and keeping in mind that I play more indie and old games than brand new AAA games but would like to have the option to player newer AA and AAA games from time to time too (e.g. BG3, Indy)? Are there any obvious shortcomings or would that suffice for someone like me? (I haven't played in 4k before, so I might not miss it.)

https://www.csl-computer.com/en/pc-csl-sprint-5683-ryzen-5.html?___store=csl_english&___from_store=csl_german

Also, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EA app refuses to work offline, always demanding to call home in spite of having credentials remembered. It also makes launch of the game twice as long. So glad for the suspend / resume functionality as the game does not require always-online play.

Incidentally, I have just finished ME1 out of the remaster trilogy on a plane (I mean, I didn't play the whole game that way, but I did finish it on the plane.)

So the game runs at 90FPS in handheld mode, but the battery lasts about ~3 hours that way. But the flight takes three hours and you also wait for two hours on the airport.

So what can the Deck do? Dynamically underclock GPU and CPU and limit framerate. After capping framerate to 30 FPS and underclocking the device, battery life shot up to a bit over 6 hours, and it did have some battery left when I have arrived.

I think I'm starting to understand why some titles on the Switch aimed for 30 FPS even if the device could handle better performance.

That's quite the jump but not quite there imo. I really like the idea of Neckband Pro & GFN or Switch 2 + XR glasses though.

A friend tried and appreciated the goofy VO was not altered haha. I saw a video and animation movement is kind of floaty.

So Oblivion Remastered came out on Steam as Steam Deck Verified, only to turn out that the framerates sometimes drop to ~25 FPS in the open world.

And a few days later, an optimization patch comes out, which can lock the game at around 40 FPS in all situations.

Yup, that's a Bethesda game launch all right.

Loboto: Well MS tends to feature AI stuff prominently and, at this point, I'd say majority of Windows tooling comes with some sort of Copilot preinstalled.

I don't mind this for select tools, in fact I make heavy use of AI on daily basis, but I'm not too confident in trusting MS with stuff like Recall or AI search.

Okay, if that's true, that would be one less concern for me.

CAN I still use MS Paint though? That's one of the features I always liked and used. :D

"I don't like the lack of choice about cloud saving, automatic updates, MS account and AI features. I want to be able to opt out of things even if MS thinks there is no reason for me to do so."

I dont know what you mean by the first part. Nothing gets saved on the cloud if you dont want to.

AI stuff like Copilot again you dont have to use like you dont have to use MS Paint or whatever :D

Well, my Win 10 was an update from Win 8.1, and my Win 8.1 was OEM, I think. At this point I guess it's not worth it to buy another Win 10 for the new PC.

I suggest looking up guides to see how much can be tweaked for Win11. They extended security updates I believe for Win10.

Actually don't get admin rights at work so I don't know but my dad helped some people with win11 and he said it was easier in Win10 so more inconvenience / preference.

@Ele: Yeah, I know. While my old (incompatible to Win 11 requirements) PC was still working, I was considering to pay for another year of Win 10 support, just to postpone the decision, but I guess that wouldn't change anything.

I don't like the lack of choice about cloud saving, automatic updates, MS account and AI features. I want to be able to opt out of things even if MS thinks there is no reason for me to do so.

Lack of live tiles sounds good. Although previous Win versions allowed me to remove and ignore them anyway.

@Nirth: What is different about admin rights in Win 11 compared to 10?

@Fenixp: What were those features that annoyed you, and would they still work without a Microsoft account? (I read there is still a way to force a local offline account, even though MS makes it harder and harder to find it).

If anything it feels less bloated than Win10 due to the complete lack of live tiles start menu stuff and what not. I mean, I get 0 distractions on my setup and I have done absolutely nothing, other than just disable recommendations in the settings app.

Win11 since day 1. Been working fine. Win10 is going out of support later this year.

Everything pushes AI nowadays. Everything.

I got sick of disabling OS-wide AI features that Microsoft loves to push on their users over the past year-ish, so I personally have fully migrated to Linux-based operating systems.

Ubuntu for my laptop and desktop, SteamOS on the Deck. All games I wanted to run are running on both my Deck and my Laptop, albeit I didn't really play a whole lot on the latter so I can't vouch for long-term stability.

As for Windows 11, I've been playing some games on it last year and didn't really run into any issues during the process. It was mostly smooth and painless, after tweaking some settings, Windows 11 very much feels like Windows 10 with some bloat removed and other bloat added.

Win10 current computer but planning on getting a laptop, one I found has win11. Use win11 for work, it's fine but it's more annoying fiddling with admin rights and this forced update cloud ♥♥♥♥ is aggravating but it can be navigated.

I was postponing this decision, but my PC broke down, so I'll have to seriously think about it now ...

What OS are you guys currently using or planning to use in the future? Did anyone switch to Win 11 yet? (I'm assuming Ele?) If so, any comments about it? What do you like better or less about it than 10?

- Gameplay touched up, new levelling system that's between Skyrim and Oblivion
- New voices added and new lines recorded
- All OG hilarious lines are back
- Fully remade visuals from the ground-up
- All animations remade
- Combat has been remade with a new dodge button
- You can now SPRINT!
- Unreal Engine 5 Visuals
- ALL DLCs are included

Mods and some time and this will be fun to return to :)

"Interesting to see how it would work on Switch 2 especially with limited view distance."
It already works on Deck (-ish). I can see that with some added optimization it could be quite pretty and stable on Switch 2.

Cool idea. Interesting to see how it would work on Switch 2 especially with limited view distance, it feels like they always over do that with open world games even if it's kind of the point haha