Let's Talk Gizmo

  Finally the day has come to share my complete gaming build. It has been a long journey due to the delay in getting the latest parts. I started buying the parts from August and finally managed to get everything by mid-December. The components that really tested my patience were the AMD Zen 3 processor and the Nvidia RTX 3000 series graphics card with the latter being really difficult to get. Getting the Nvidia Founders Edition graphics card in India is really difficult as the only official seller is RPTech India. I had to wait for more than a month to finally get the order form from them. But after placing the order, they were really quick in getting it delivered. With everything installed and setup, it has been around a month that I have been using my gaming computer. My overall experience with this PC is great. Everything works really smooth. I have no issues in any games that I have played till now. This is my first gaming PC so that could be the reason why I am finding it to ...

Storage storage and more storage! No matter how much storage we have it is never going to be sufficient. This is especially true when we have a lot of games and videos stored in our PCs. The use of online streaming platforms and improved availability of good internet speeds have greatly reduced the need to store videos offline but games keep on increasing in size. The recent games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla requires more than 50 GB of storage space whereas Cyberpunk 2077 needs more than 70 GB. Having said that, to make our PC work great does not need huge amounts of storage. We can have our system running great even with a 128 GB storage space. Windows 10 requires around 32 GB of storage space which leaves us with more than 90 GB of free space. Of course, some storage space will be used for other applications like web browser and document editing software. But we will still have at least 65-75 GB of free storage space. For photos and videos we can make use of external drives w...

When it comes to power supplies (PSU - power supply unit), it is one of the most overlooked PC components but is one of the important parts of a build. If you check on Amazon or any other site, you will be able to find power supplies ranging from Rs. 500 to Rs. 30,000 or more. I know it is tempting to go for the cheap ones and save money for other parts but don't fall for the cheap ones. They are usually of poor quality and may damage your expensive components due to fluctuations. Look for the certifications. You will find something like 80+ certified label. These labels indicate the efficiency of power supply at different loads. There are different levels of these certifications like bronze, silver, gold, platinum and titanium. You can read more about it on Wikipedia . I would recommend going for at least a bronze certified power supply. Although it might not guarantee excellent quality but the certification does ensure that it has met some criteria to fulfil the certification. Y...

When looking for PC cabinets, there are a lot of options for different budget segments to choose from. But which one is for you depends on what kind of system you are building, the kind of looks you prefer and the price point you are targeting. Since I am looking to build a gaming system, the most important thing for me would be the case airflow. It is always great to have a good airflow for any kind of system but is very important in heavy workloads such as gaming, content creation, etc. Then comes the build quality which is also important but depends heavily on how much you are willing to spend on it. There a lot of cases which provide great looks and pricing but not all provide a great build quality. There are some cases which have a great build quality but looks old school. So you have to choose the one which has the perfect balance based on your taste. Then comes the aesthetics which is not that important but for a gaming rig anyone would prefer a good looking component. I would ...

In the previous article , I had mentioned that I am inclined towards Nvidia graphic cards currently. The main reason for this has been the performance improvement over the previous generation along with almost no increase in pricing. It is not cheap but compared to the pricing of the previous generations, this is relatively reasonable. Another reason being Radeon not really having anything comparable in their previous generation. Nvidia pushed back the release dates for RTX 3070 due to stock issues it faced during the release of RTX 3080 and 3090 cards. The new release date is on October 29, 2020 which a day later than the Radeon launch event on October 28, 2020. This is great as those looking to buy the RTX 3070 can at least know what AMD has for its Radeon lineup. So based on this I have decided to wait till the AMD Radeon launch over and then finalize on the graphics card. I will update this article after the launch of AMD Radeon Big Navi. So stay tuned... Update: AMD revealed it...

AMD announced it's Zen 3 lineup on 8th October, 2020. The launch was exciting as it was the first time AMD has got so close to Intel and in some cases outperformed it in terms of gaming performance. Let's look at the main highlights of the launch: 8-core CCX (core complex) AMD has changed its layout to fit 8 cores in a single CCX module when compared to 4 cores in Zen 2. This avoids the need to split 32MB L3 cache into 2x 16MB making the entire 32MB accessible directly to all cores. This not only reduces memory latency but also provides great improvements in gaming and single core performance. This is one of the major reasons for such increase in performance when compared to the previous generation. 19% higher instructions per clock Before the launch, it was expected that Zen 3 would bring in 15% higher IPC but it has brought in 4% more than what was expected which is tremendous. IPC is nothing but the number of instructions that the CPU can execute in a single clock cycle. Thi...