PC Gamers are engima wrapped up in a mystery. Okay not really. They are just bunch of easily led automotons who are suckers for a gimmick but I didn’t want to start the flaming in the first sentance. But what drives them to do the things they do? Well other than the fact most of them are either teenagers or if not actual teenagers have never emotionally/intellectually matured past that point anyway.

On Mice and Keyboards

Mice and keyboards are, according to PC Gamers the most used part of a computer.  I agree totally. After the power supply, CPU, memory, hard drive, monitor and all most every other part of the computer other than the speakers the keyboard and mouse undergo the most constant strain. Thus spending that ‘little bit extra’ on good quality input peripherals really makes a difference. Well it does if by quality you mean well made a resilient and not made of acres of black plastic, containing 600 buttons and some funky blue light emitting diodes. You see PC Gamers are all about perception so if you slap the words ‘gamers’ or ‘gaming’ into the name or description of your mouse then they will pay double the normal price you could ask for. Stick a few blue LEDs in there and then you can pretty count on triple. And hell give it a name like ‘Razer Deathadder’ and you can pretty much charge what you want and PC Gamers will buy them by the dozen. Make some ludicrous claim about DPI and ‘outshining the competition’ and every wannabe World Champion Quake player (am I showing my age here?) will dream about owning your product. Doesn’t matter if exactly the same mouse is available in grey, without the LEDs and ‘gamer’ tag for £10 at PC World.

PC Gamers also like their input peripherals to have 3 year warranties. Why? Who keeps a PC for 3 years let alone the keyboard and mouse?  Not gamers as they cycle their PC components on a 6 monthly basis to keep up with the new technology. Lets skip over the part about manufacturers only offering a warranty when they know 99.9% of their product will last well beyond that time anyway and ask what are they doing to their keyboards and mice that need what amounts to 3 years of insurance? Personally I don’t want to know. And to be honest unless you have access to an autoclave you should be getting rid of your keyboard every 12 months otherwise you risk starting a new plague, especially if you are a fat greasy gamer.

On Graphics Cards and Frame Rates

These two actually do make a difference to PC Gaming but only to a point. If you don’t have a Graphics card meaty enough to play the game on full detail and in a high resolution you are going to be disappointed. But again only to a point. Ideally a game needs to run around 60 frames per second (lower if not an action orientated game) so it can easily cope with quick turns and the like. Sure the human eye can only see up to around 25fps but a  quick 180 turn can look like a slide show at those kinds of frame rates. At the moment unless you have a PC copy of GTA IV or a monitor the size of Wales all your games will work perfectly adequately on a good graphics card you purchased last year. This isn’t enough for PC Gamers though, oh no. All PC Gamers dream of having a quad SLI gaming rig (yes they call their PCs rigs like they are some kind of big truck or something). Now what does this mean? Well put simply this means 4 graphics cards daisy chained together into what amounts so a small supercomputer cluster. Why? Well on a computer with 4 high end graphics cards you can pretty much run the game ‘Crysis’ at a frame rate higher than the monitor can refresh. How awesome is that? Not very when you consider that each graphics card in this chain will cost, ideally, in the range of £350. PC Gamers will pay upwards of £1000 just for their graphics cards despite not having the games nor other hardware available to see the benefits.

Frame rates are the main source of kudos in PC Gaming. PC Gamers will sound hours and £1000s getting their frame rates as high as possible. They will buy the best CPUs, SLI Graphics setups, hard drives, memory and other parts to up their frame rates. Ideally memory should be installed in matched pairs. A matched pair is two stick of RAM that is from the same production batch and paired with a partner that most closely matches its performance levels. They should naturally be put in opposite memory slots for maximum gain. This will make all of 2 fps difference if you are lucky. Hard drives are vastly losing out the Solid State Drives these days as the read speeds are much higher. Sadly SSDs cost 4-5x the amount a hard drive does for 4-5x less storage space. Some even go to the expense of buying network cards (£100+) that have their own processor on board so another few FPS can be squeezed out from saving the CPU from dealing with network traffic.

PC Gamers will also spend hours optimising their PC to drag every extra frame out of their ‘rig’ and run testing tools that automatically upload their results up to website so they can brag. You know hours they could spend playing PC games.

On Overclocking, Case Modding and Water Cooling.

Eventually PC Gamers get to the point that optimising just isn’t enough. Then they move into overclocking. This basically involves reducing your CPU or graphics cards functional lifetime by a factor of 10 for every extra few 100mhz you get out of your computer. See the Red Dwarf episode ‘White Hole‘ for reference.  This of course improves your frame rates. What you do is force your CPU or GPU to run faster that it was designed to do. It also often requires you to pump more power into the component than it was designed to take. Think of the things Scotty used to do to the Enterprise to get it up an extra 0.1 warp and how well that usually worked for the poor old ship. Anyway, more power means more heat. Too much heat means the Klingons catch up with you and make the Enterprise explode. So you need to cool down your rig. The coolers that come with the CPU and graphics cards are no usually up to the task so this means paying some serious dollar for new coolers and fans. What you end up with is the inside of a PC that looks like a cross between a H.R. Giger fantasy and a industrial ventilation system. The plus point is all that hot air your PC pushes out into the room means you don’t need a heater in winter.

You will get to the point that good old fashioned air cooling will not keep your PC components below melting point. The natural progression for the PC Gamer is to move to water cooling. After all even Porche water cools their cars these days and your PC isn’t a Volkswagen Beetle is it? As your parents no doubt told you water and electricity don’t mix. That is not true, they mix very well indeed which is the main problem. So mixing water pumps and tubing in with the wires of your PC is a daunting prospect. Actually it isn’t. Any half-wit with a modicum of common sense could install an off the shelf kit without any problems. You would think this would rule out most PC Gamers but it seems being less than a half-wit is no set back seeing as how easy water cooling systems can be installed. Its just plugging tubes into holes and filling up a tank with water for pities sake but PC Gamers make it out to be some kind of challenge. Maybe it is for them. Therefore no self respecting gamer buys an off the shelf kit. They buy each component individually at a greatly inflated cost so that they can shift just that little more heat and up the overclock just that little bit more. In fact Water cooling is getting so close to mainstream that they real PC Gamers are moving to new and exciting cooling systems involving oil immersion, liquid gases and the heat death of alternate universes.

Case modding starts for PC gamers as cutting large holes in their PC to let all the damned heat out. It has got to the point you can now buy PC cases without the actual case. How you keep wildlife and sloughed skins cells out of that only the gods know. Holes in your PC look nasty so PC games try to disguise them with laser cut fan guards and LEDs bright enough to blind helicopter pilots. If you are particularly proud of the mess inside your PC case you might have a perspex window on the side and install cathode ray tubes inside. After all they purchased a power supply powerful enough to power their fridge freezer so they might as well use it for something. Hard core games use black light tubes so they can show off their dandruff too.

How do they afford all this?

Well most of them don’t because they are teenagers on limited means .i.e pocket money or paper rounds. Thus 90% of PC gamers lie about their PC setup to impress people on discussion forums. It is like the gaming equivalent of anorexia. The ones that can afford it are either men-children or teenagers with rich parents. In fact it lack of money that initially drove the adoption of overclocking. As a PC Gamer If you can’t afford the latest best CPU you buy a cheap one and make damn sure it is as almost as fast as the expensive one even if that means it would only last 6 months and that you have to spend more money than the difference between the two processors on cooling equipment.

The PC Gaming Culture

I might have already mentioned PC Gamers are either teenagers or just act like them. Once or twice maybe? Thus PC Gaming culture (I use the term in the loosest possible sense) is juvenile and immature. All conversation take place in a mixture of ‘txtspeak’ and ‘leetspeak’. So plenty of ‘LOL’, ’1337′ and ‘OMG’ will be peppered in their pseudo English forum posts. Oh my! How very Anglo-centric of me, I of course mean’t to refer to whatever language they usually converse in. Leetspeak the gamers borrowed from Hacker culture because they dream of being cool anti-establishment heroes like Angelina Jolie. Thusly conversing with a PC Gamer is like holding a conversation with your next door neighbour’s semi-retarded teenage son. They never use ‘thusly’ for example even though it is a horrible Americanism designed to make people look more intelligent than they are. Lack of knowledge is seen as weakness in PC Gaming circles and will cause you do be derided by PC Gamers. Favourite insults include calling people ‘noobs’ or ‘newbies’ therefore focusing on the apparent lack of knowledge. Other popular insults are ‘ghey’ or other euphemisms for homosexuality because thinking you might be gay is the only thing that terrifies a teenage boy PC Gamer more than seeming stupid (to their peers at least). That and having a shower.

Conclusions

PC Gamers are mostly idiots who waste money.

Well that’s the end of this article as I can’t stand to be next to my rig anymore because it is a hot day and it is pumping out tons of heat thanks to the new fan I screwed onto my CPU cooler yesterday. It is also getting a little noisy so I’m going to have to get a water cooling kit at some point. What?