Gaming on Mini-ITX

We're going to do something different today and put together a parts guide for one of the cooler PC gaming builds you can make these days. Most people naturally go with a mid or full-size ATX case and appropriate motherboard for their gaming rigs, and there are benefits to that, such as the added workspace inside the system, cable management, and improved cooling. But the truth is you can fit a lot of performance, in fact most of the performance of a large tower into a small form factor system. If you want a gaming PC that you can lug around the house or to a friend's place for some LANing, obviously you could just go with a gaming laptop. But if you just want to have the Master Race gaming experience with a smaller footprint, there's mini-ITX.

AMD's Nervous Breakdown Pt.2

One of the things I've loved most about AMD over the years is their forward-looking processors and platforms. In 2004 I upgraded my old Athlon XP system to a spiffy new Socket 939 Athlon 64, and was pretty happy with the improved performance. I had no idea how well the platform would pay off for me, though, when dual-core processors started to take off shortly after. By 2007 my PC was aging, but with a simple BIOS update, an Athlon 64 X2 was just a drop-in upgrade away from adding another two years of life to the system. I imagine it was a lot like how people felt when they put an i486 OverDrive chip into their 1992-era PCs.

Reevaluating Laptops

I used to have a small website called Rep's Simple Page where I first started this whole rambling thing. I sucked at HTML and I would put in all the little markup commands by hand, so it was really primitive looking. It would have felt right at home in the 80s. The cool thing about that little site was that for whatever reason, it felt really private. I would voice my most controversial opinions as brashly as I pleased, basically emulating The Best Page in the Universe but without all the humor or wit, because I didn't think anybody would read them. Last night I went through an archive of some of the ramblings I wrote, and between cringing at the grammar I was struck by how crass and raw it was, something I sadly think I've lost since moving my stuff here. Nothing's really changed -- if anything it's more private here, but I write as if I'm trying to be objective; like I've got the reputation of a major journalistic website riding on it. I'm supposed to be angry, goddammit! Fuck objectivity!

But I digress. A lot of my writings back then were relics of their time, reflecting the trends that were occurring then, and in retrospect bringing to mind the trends that I never saw coming. One particularly good example of this was my Laptops vs Netbooks rambling, which I've taken care to upload here. If ever there was a quaint snapshot of the computing world before tablets, that would be it.