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.

That’s disheartening to hear. At least Tesla has to sell cars to even stick around and it doesn’t look good for them in Europe so far.

I was about to say, this seems pretty slam dunk for them.

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

Yea this stinks of someone’s palms not getting greased enough.

Grind culture in a nutshell.

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.

I won’t disagree, but the controlled narrative the Kremlin pushes is still very much the definition of propaganda.

It just shows how effective top down propaganda is.

Thank you for putting a name to a face. I’ve seen these gifs forever and never knew who they were.

Like the other commenter said, you can get some pretty good deals due to the recent issues.

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.

Honestly anything would have been better than those old iron dukes. They were dated in the 80’s

Sometimes the afflictions didn’t trigger properly like accidentally healing an enemy because decay was applied same turn etc. also turn order and initiative is impossible to predict. In a 4 person co-op game there must always be an alternating turn order regardless of number of players. So basically we’ve had players skipped for two whole rounds because the AI gets to go again. It’s fairly consistent in that regard. It’s frustrating because it’s usually a different person each session that just gets entirely skipped over for almost the entire fight.

And to be honest, I liked the action/bonus action mechanic as it makes the turns go faster. We just did a 4 player bg3 campaign earlier this year and the fights went way faster.

And the crafting mechanic has a high learning curve.

I did find the physical/magic armor mechanic different. I don’t have any real opinion either way with it.