27 | October | 2015 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

This month’s EVE Online Blog Banter, number 68 in the series, is titled This is my Rig.

This is my Rig, There are Many Like it…
What do you play Eve on? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours! Are you pew-pewing on a laptop? Plotting universal domination on a 12 monitor set up? Mining away on a 50″ TV? Is your set up located where your other half can speak to you or do you lock yourself away for hours in your Eve themed shed? How do you play your important internet spaceships?

So I looked at my desk setup and realized that not much has changed over the last few years. I did a post on a very similar topic back in 2007 and found that not much has changed on my desk. So much so that I am not going to bother taking a new picture, because the old one still pretty much reflects my desktop situation.

The table is unusually clear in this picture

Also, I would have to clean up the stacks of papers that tend to accumulated on either end of my desk for a decent picture.

But otherwise I have the same Dell 20″ 1600×1200 (4:3 ratio) monitor (still with the same desktop pattern), the same Logitech G15 keyboard (though the back lighting is going out on half the keys), the same Kensington Expert Mouse (though the ball was marred when one of the cats decided that biting it was a good idea), and the same Logitech speakers (which now have a loose wire in the volume control so I have to wiggle it sometimes to get sound). Even the power strip and the holder for envelopes are the same more than eight years later.

Desktop picture for many years…

I am a couple of headsets down the road, though I still have the pair in the picture, a Plantronics .510 set, I just use it at work for VoIP calls rather than at home. At home I have a Logitech g930 wireless headset, which I wrote about in another post, and which I am only moderately fond of.

And I have gone from a 3rd generation iPod to a 3rd generation iPod Nano, which I purchased not long after that picture was taken, so there is no longer an iPod dock on the desk, just a cable with the old style connector which works with both the iPod and my iPad 2.

What is under the desk has changed a few time since that picture was taken. The big purple Alienware case is long gone. The Velocity Micro system I got at the end of 2007, with an early Intel Quad Core processor, replaced my wife’s last computer and is still mostly suited to her needs.

The big black and well ventilated Cooler Master case from the system I built back in 2010 is still there. However, after the big disaster of a year ago, when a power supply I had been thinking about replace went out and took almost everything connected with it, there was a pretty substantial rebuild.

So here is what is driving my gaming today:

Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H motherboard
Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Processor
nVidia GeForce GTX 960 video card with 4GB of VRAM
12GB of RAM
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
240GB SSD for the OS
2TB internal HDD for storage
2TB of external HDD for backups (all those screen shots gotta live somewhere)
1 BluRay/DVD/CD Read/Write unit that survived the power supply incident

All of which is enough to give the system a Windows 7 experience score of 7.6 on a scale of 1 to 7.9… because why would we do something crazy and use a 1 to 10 scale or something. (The scale is different on Windows 8 and Windows 10 if I recall right.)

I also like how your score isn’t a weighted average or anything, but just the lowest item on the list. I smell a marketing decision.

All of which gives me sufficient resources to run most games I play with the graphic settings turned up pretty high. Specifically, I can play EVE Online in pretty graphics mode in a big battle with two clients running and things seem to run okay. Windows 7 does insist on turning off the Windows Aero desktop graphics when I run two clients, but that is fine by me.

So that is what I am running. Ergonomically I am still playing in 2007, while under the covers I do have enough horsepower to play what I want to. I’ll probably need a new keyboard at some point, and I dream of a bigger monitor some day, but for now I am still set, and there are a lot of other things on the list that come ahead of new toys for me.

Others participating in Blog Banter 68: