Gabe Newell: Valve will release its own console-like PC

Playing Witcher 2 over wifi on my i3 laptop worked very well. An occasional hitch but otherwise a very smooth responsive experience. Very impressive for just a beta so far.

 

alienware was to reveal the specs of alienware steam box on pax 14 . anyone have any news of that?

 

Is that really anything worth waiting for? It's a Dell PC, built with regular PC components in a custom chassis, to be sold at a high, overpriced price.

 

On the subject, I've always wondered. Who is Alienware's consumer? I seems to me that people enthusiastic enough about PC gaming to buy a kit as expensive as theirs, would also be informed enough and willing enough, to take the time to build their own with either a cheaper cost or even beafier componets

 

Building a PC can be a strenuous task for the not-technically-minded. I've interacted with a number of people who are incredibly impressed by my ability to build my own computers. These people aren't dumb, they're just not knowledgeable/interested in digging around in PC guts, that's all.

Also, I don't think it's a universal factor that you have to be interested in PC hardware itself just because you like to own a fat gaming rig and play games on it... I know I am less into the hardware aspect myself these days, some days I actually long for the day when all computer hardware is powerful enough to run super slick games on the equivalent of something like a tablet, so that both the ability to replace hardware and the NEED to do it both are gone.

I've sworn curses up and down over my various PCs as I've been forced to tug and tear at awkwardly placed cable connectors and components. It would be nice to some day just be rid of all that, or that's what I tell myself anyway.

 

I've seen people building their gaming PC for the first time and doing an excellent job,

it doesn't take much to enter tomshardware.com or something similar and to copy their monthly suggested builds.

 

You don't seem to understand the issue. Perhaps because you don't want to.

I shan't elaborate, because, what would be the point?

 

I stopped building my own PC's last year. After over two decades of serrated fingers, lost screws, thermal paste incidents, and one very interesting accident with liquid nitrogen.

My last creation sits under my desk and is never switched on any more, mainly because it would add a significant amount to my electricity bill but also because it is no longer bleeding edge so I don't see the reason to use it. I have two laptops that I use for recreation and work and gaming is now done via console. I have my tablet, phone, and Vita to take care of casual bus rides and journeys (and the odd meeting as well..).

I just don't see the point in creating and building PC's any more, I fix them for people and I upgrade them as well but building one from scratch is not something I think I'll ever do again.

 

Each to their own. To me, the selection and contruction of custom components into a working (and often bleeding edge) piece of sophisticated equipment is an end unto itself. In many ways, the games are just the apps I use to benchmark and show off the capbilities of my system, the fact that they're also fun is almost incidental.

For me personally, gaming on a standardised machine that's exactly the same as everyone elses and runs locked down software with no optoins to change/configure/benchmark is as dull as dishwater. I guess the reality is that I'm more of a system builder/enthusiast than I am a gamer. I'd still game if PC gaming didn't exist (on consoles) but I'd probably be much more of a casual gamer than the enthusiast that I am right now.

 

Those days are mostly long past. I build my current machine some months ago and there was nothing nasty about it. Cases don't have razor-sharp edge on their metal any more AFAIK. The only unnerving part was fitting the CPU, as the mount makes exactly the same cracking sound when pressed into place as something breaking. With decent instructions, building a PC isn't at all hard as everything just slots into place. It's just time consuming. It therefore won't be for everyone, but it's the best way to get good hardware cheap!

 

Cases may not have sharp edges anymore - mostly anyway - but building a PC can still be really intimidating to some people. The "What if screw it up!" factor can be a huge deterrent. If you build your own PC, fuck up somehow, and then it won't start when you turn on the power may well mean voided warranty, extra troubleshooting fees, headaches and so on.

If your new self-built PC doesn't turn on when you try to, and you don't know why, then you're truly SOL. Maybe you can put the components together using a guide, but if you don't know WHY things fit into each other a certain way then when something doesn't work you'll still be stuck.

I know that in the past, when PCs I've (re)built have refused to start, all that might have caused it was a GPU or a DIMM not quite fully seated in its socket, and after a push on the component in question it did start up, but if it was say a bad power supply, then what. Ok, short green pin to black and bring up the ole multimeter, of course! Well, of course! We all know these tricks, don't we. And we know how to do them?

Yes, of course we do.

Or in other words, to a neophyte amateur, it's just another case of the gehoxagogen being framed up by the ramastan.

 

That fear-factor is definitely a big discouragement, but that's kinda true in trying anything new, although the cost of a fatal cock-up can be more than a collapsed soufflé or smudged ceramic painting. However, it's actually hard to cock up that much. You're not going to blow a new CPU by forgetting to add the thermal paste because it'll throttle back and shut-down. So the problems are basically not connecting things properly, like the time I didn't fully seat my GPU and thought I had killed it or something. If all the plugs go in the right places, it'll work.

Of all the things one could undertake, building a new PC is probably pretty safe. It just needs some clear walkthroughs and guidance (which may not exist). It'll never be for the mainstream though, any more than car maintenance is.

 

It's quite possible to fuck up modern intel LGA sockets by being a little careless. That's your motherboard, AND potentially CPU, if you don't notice you fucked up, and insert a CPU managing to short power to ground (or signals to VCC or ground) for example. I know, because I almost wrecked a $300-plus-cost-to-replace Dell S775 mobo a number of years back now. I was gonna wipe off a smudge of thermal paste on the frame of the mounting mechanism, and the tissue paper brushed very lightly against the tiny LGA contact leaves, bending several of them. Luckily, I was able to bend 'em back down again without any of them breaking off.

Other things that tend to break easily in PCs are SATA connectors. Also, I suspect you could perhaps wreck your CPU, and/or possibly DIMMs by not fully inserting the memory stick into its socket. I further suspect it's possible to wreck your mobo by forcibly removing DIMMs that have gotten stuck in one of those overly-clever ASUS sockets with only one locking tab. I've tried to pull out the dimms on my current haswell mobo but been forced to hold back, due to the entire socket actually moving visibly when tugging on the DIMM...

Then there's the issue of ESD.

 

Strangely enough, it's verydifficult to break the motherboard when you insert or remove memory...
I think that most of the horror stories you might hear, are just that, horror stories.
I haven't ever managed to brake a SATA connector.
Being a technician, I should have done it already. I have no idea how many disk images I've created over the years...
To give you an idea, when I forcibly removed IDE card ribbons from the mobo, the most common problem was that the ribbon would tear apart rather than the IDE connector brake from the PCB.

If a DIMM is not fully inserted, your pc will most likely not post at all.
It wont wreck the CPU, the mB, or even the RAM itself.
A shot circuit, most of the times will cause a hard reboot, and in very few cases, will fry something. But that means, that there is something very wrong with your PSU...

Static electricity can fry a component... It never happened to me, and most of the times I don't use anything as to be certain I won't run onto that problem.
I'd guess 90% of the systems I've built, where built with no such measures whatsoever.

If we were talking about the 90s, then I'd say you are right.
Back then, you could insert an IDE card ribbon the wrong way, and the pc wouldn't post.
You had to know about master/slave jumpers...
There were actual jumpers on the motherboard you had to fiddle with...!
But now, you can't possibly insert anything the wrong way...

Even the cpu is easy to insert, and can be inserted, (I'm working with Intel, can't say about amd) in one possible way.
The only thing that can be a little tricky is the heat sink.
But if you do it the easy way, place the cpu memory and heat sink first, and then place the motherboard into the box, it's hard to run into trouble.

At one time, we were trying to fry a first generation celeron...
We used a soldering iron to overheat it and forced it on so as not to give it enough breathing to cool off, we even used water, but neither did it.
We then used a combination of water and setting the PSU to US voltage.
Only then did it die...!

 

I remember an old Athlon K7 (I think it was) that was freshly installed popping out of its casement when the PC was powered up without heat sink or anything. Made a very interesting sound but smelt really bad.

 

building (connecting the parts) a PC is not a big challenging nowadays, there is not much that can go wrong to be honest, and plenty of guides and youtube videos to help,

as I said, I've seen a significant number of first time builders with no experience a doing a very good job,


damaging the "pins" from the lga socket is something more or less common, but you have to be really unlucky or careless for that.

this would never happen with newer CPUs,

 

When I was a kid/teenager, I:

- Burned a motherboard and all the RAM by placing a DIMM the wrong way (don't ask me how, it just happened).
- Broke (chiped) an Athlon XP trying to fit a cooler that was supposedly compatible with that socket. So many popular coolers were so poorly made, and the lack of a metal shim in the CPU made them even worse.
- Burned a Duron and its motherboard when I tried the pencil hack to unlock it.
- Burned a soundcard and some PCI slots from the motherboard ceased to function when the custom watercooling system got a leak.
- Pretty sure I got lots of problems with certain graphics cards not working with certain motherboards and CPUs. Drivers simply wouldn't cope with each other.



Building a PC is very easy for me and I can do it in 20 minutes. But that's me. I grew up making a hobby out of it and now I'm used to certain problems that may appear.
Had I not spent so many hours reading, practicing and making mistakes around it, I'm 100% sure I wouldn't feel comfortable with building a PC of my own.

 

never happend to me, it wont fit on the wrong direction

current CPUs have metal cover

such mods don't exist anymore, and were never recommended for newcomers anyway

custom watercooling is less popular and necessary, again irrelevant for a first timer

this was common back on the AGP days, now with PCI Express almost everything works, and if you are buying a current MB and VGA it always works.

it's easy for me, when I started youtube didn't exist, I didn't know any Internet forums, reddit or whatever, it was a little difficult, but right now the hardware is much easier to handle and you have a ton of information very accessible,

it's not comparable to the old days, as I said I've seen a lot of "kids" watching some youtube guides and building nice gaming PCs.

 

And as I said, you just don't want to see the issue, which is that many people simply don't feel comfortable even contemplating building their own PCs. It doesn't matter how easy you think it is, they just don't want to do it. I can totally understand them too, it's not something for everyone, especially not investigating which parts to buy in the first place or from where.

 

- I fried a motherboard's PS/2 port by plugging in an IBM PS/2's keyboard while the PC was running. Can't happen nowadays.. but maybe still can if you really come across a keyboard from the 1980s and want to use it. It's less critical as a USB keyboard will be supported out of the box even to get in the BIOS or UEFI setup.
- I also fried a motherboard just by getting a hard drive on the bottom of the HDD cage while wearing static eletricity inducing clothing.
- Earlier, I melted two of a Pentium 166's pin because the pins had bent and I forced the thing into the CPU socket.. CPU survived and went onto an identical motherboard thanksfully.
- Burned too many Sound Blaster Live to count when running then not fastened to the case and looking at them the wrong way
- Extreme forced must be applied on a Duron's heatsink to make it come off, so I hit a motherboard hard with a screwdriver rendering it useless

So nowadays it's easier. Still, I've recently come across the "joys" of UEFI on a brand new motherboard, everything new except the case and PSU from 2005. Booting USB is harder as you have a choice between "USB : [drive name]" and "UEFI : [drive name]", one of which doesn't work. But then, after creating a nifty scheme (eight primary partitions! woohoo) and installing linux, trying to install Windows 7 just failed and then made the system unbootable. I reinstalled linux and it was still unbootable. Then by chance I saw that booting the HDD entry worked fine whereas the "linuxmint" entry offered by UEFI was corrupt/wrong, and I couldn't remove it (for now).

Then I had to google how to install Windows 7 (which complains the blank partition I left for it was not ntfs formatted.. and after formatting it, that the partition table is gpt!) on a UEFI + GPT computer, it says I have to boot the CD/DVD in UEFI mode, which is not an option I was offered. So I'll have to make a Windows 7 USB stick from a Windows machine (two attempts made from linux with two methods gave me an unbootable one)

So, UEFI has just made stuff harder and cryptic. (it has scary stuff like network access from the setup program or whatever the graphical pseudo-BIOS screen is called)

.. leading to a situation where you have to google for stuff to work around UEFI deficiencies ; motherboard manual included is sadly a multilingual "quick installation guide" which gives everything about how to plug the hardware, but no word on UEFI/firmware. It's not clear what can be done from the "UEFI command line" either and given the ease of failing to boot it would be useful to have it detailed in a printed manual .