A Rigged Game
So my sons Birthday has recently passed and the timing could not have been better.
My son has been asking me about buying a new computer of which I said I will not do.
I told him, "No new computer but...I will build you a new one."
"YES!"
I didn't ask my wife if this was okay and she was quite surprised when the boxes came in from Newegg.
"Whats all this?" she asked.
"Oh just a little something for his birthday." I said.
"Doesn't look like a little something to me..." she said.
She had that pouty look on her face like she was getting ready to argue.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Well its a surprise so you know can't really talk about that..." I said.
Her eyes traveled to the boxes maybe she already had an idea of what it was because she turned away.
I had to sneak around the house a bit into the basement to make sure my son, my daughter and my wife wouldn't know what I was up to.
It took me about 3 days to get everything set up just the way I wanted it.
I ended up buying an ASrock Mobo which supports AM3+ Cpus.
An AMD 3.6 GHZ FX-4100 CPU.
A 1600 MHZ 4 gb stick of ram from AMD.
A 60 gig OCZ Agility 3 SSD.
A Radeon HD 6570 with 1 GB of VRAM.
& I picked out the Rosewill Challenger Case.
All in all with discounts it came out to $405 if you count the new Logitech keyboard and the DVD burner I had to buy elsewhere its around $460 total.
Anyway I took my sweet time with it knowing that his birthday was a week away and I wouldn't be able to do anything other than set it up and get it running til then.
I was a little nervous about turning it on once everything was plugged in.
I mean these newer technologies seem to use so much more power now and if anything were to short out I wouldn't be a happy camper.
On the first switch on it worked great.
Even the bios gui is such a far cry from those old blue looking ones.
Everything was detected right off the bat.
I went through the Windows 7 install in under 20 mins.
However I must have done something wrong because one of the drivers I installed from the ASrock Mobo CD kept crashing it when trying to boot Windows.
I did a fresh install and on the second time everything worked exactly as it should.
For the next day I went through all the necessary downloads and set the parental limitations on his account.
Once that was done I gave it a quick test run with World of Tanks and Counter Strike.
The graphics looked so much better on both games.
On World of Tanks I was getting around 70 FPS per second and it never dipped below 40.
With CS I noticed that my latency was at 8 ms.
This ASrock mobo has a Xfastlan app and wow does it make a difference.
Doing a bulk download off the internet I seriously saw it reach 5 MBs per second at one point.
How times have changed 20 years ago you'd be lucky if you get 5 kbs!
As my son's birthday came closer I had to suppress the urge to run down stairs and start gaming.
He had a few friends over none of which I recognize and one girl was there too, Katy or something.
They were all playing around the Xbox and poking fun at each other as kids will do.
My wife eventually brought out the cake and the traditional happy birthday singing commenced.
After things calmed down and everyone gifted him. When I was the only one left he looked at me and I could see he was starting to think I cut out on our deal.
I made out as if I had to use the bathroom.
Grabbed the box and stealthy walked up the stairs.
He jumped up from couch and that bright smile that only kids can make made me feel pretty good.
"Happy Birthday son." I said.
"Thanks dad!"
I could see the other friends were already glowing over his new machine.
"Get it open!"
"I wanna see it!"
My daughter was very quite during all of this and seemed a little irritable.
She stayed close to her mother for most of the duration of the party.
When the machine went on my son immediately started gaming.
Everything seemed great and I felt pretty good about myself.
He loaded the Diablo 3 Open Beta and him, his friends, and myself switched turns playing.
My daughter came upstairs at some point to see all the excitement.
"Why do you guys play those stupid games!"
I was saying something when one of the kids broke my train of thought.
"Go play DDR or something."
The laughter was contagious and even as much as I could supress it a short giggle came out of my mouth.
"You guys are jerks."
Then she walked away.
The Diablo 3 craze has caught onto me same as the Diablo 2 craze did it to me 10 years ago.
There are some people who really have been hating on it but I am rather happy with it.
I had some free time before so I was planning on submitting some art to "Portrait of a Champion" contest.
The sketching was easy, photoshopping it wasn't.
I ended up not even submitting what I came up with.
But here they are:
My son has been asking me about buying a new computer of which I said I will not do.
I told him, "No new computer but...I will build you a new one."
"YES!"
I didn't ask my wife if this was okay and she was quite surprised when the boxes came in from Newegg.
"Whats all this?" she asked.
"Oh just a little something for his birthday." I said.
"Doesn't look like a little something to me..." she said.
She had that pouty look on her face like she was getting ready to argue.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Well its a surprise so you know can't really talk about that..." I said.
Her eyes traveled to the boxes maybe she already had an idea of what it was because she turned away.
I had to sneak around the house a bit into the basement to make sure my son, my daughter and my wife wouldn't know what I was up to.
It took me about 3 days to get everything set up just the way I wanted it.
I ended up buying an ASrock Mobo which supports AM3+ Cpus.
An AMD 3.6 GHZ FX-4100 CPU.
A 1600 MHZ 4 gb stick of ram from AMD.
A 60 gig OCZ Agility 3 SSD.
A Radeon HD 6570 with 1 GB of VRAM.
& I picked out the Rosewill Challenger Case.
All in all with discounts it came out to $405 if you count the new Logitech keyboard and the DVD burner I had to buy elsewhere its around $460 total.
Anyway I took my sweet time with it knowing that his birthday was a week away and I wouldn't be able to do anything other than set it up and get it running til then.
I was a little nervous about turning it on once everything was plugged in.
I mean these newer technologies seem to use so much more power now and if anything were to short out I wouldn't be a happy camper.
On the first switch on it worked great.
Even the bios gui is such a far cry from those old blue looking ones.
Everything was detected right off the bat.
I went through the Windows 7 install in under 20 mins.
However I must have done something wrong because one of the drivers I installed from the ASrock Mobo CD kept crashing it when trying to boot Windows.
I did a fresh install and on the second time everything worked exactly as it should.
For the next day I went through all the necessary downloads and set the parental limitations on his account.
Once that was done I gave it a quick test run with World of Tanks and Counter Strike.
The graphics looked so much better on both games.
On World of Tanks I was getting around 70 FPS per second and it never dipped below 40.
With CS I noticed that my latency was at 8 ms.
This ASrock mobo has a Xfastlan app and wow does it make a difference.
Doing a bulk download off the internet I seriously saw it reach 5 MBs per second at one point.
How times have changed 20 years ago you'd be lucky if you get 5 kbs!
As my son's birthday came closer I had to suppress the urge to run down stairs and start gaming.
He had a few friends over none of which I recognize and one girl was there too, Katy or something.
They were all playing around the Xbox and poking fun at each other as kids will do.
My wife eventually brought out the cake and the traditional happy birthday singing commenced.
After things calmed down and everyone gifted him. When I was the only one left he looked at me and I could see he was starting to think I cut out on our deal.
I made out as if I had to use the bathroom.
Grabbed the box and stealthy walked up the stairs.
He jumped up from couch and that bright smile that only kids can make made me feel pretty good.
"Happy Birthday son." I said.
"Thanks dad!"
I could see the other friends were already glowing over his new machine.
"Get it open!"
"I wanna see it!"
My daughter was very quite during all of this and seemed a little irritable.
She stayed close to her mother for most of the duration of the party.
When the machine went on my son immediately started gaming.
Everything seemed great and I felt pretty good about myself.
He loaded the Diablo 3 Open Beta and him, his friends, and myself switched turns playing.
My daughter came upstairs at some point to see all the excitement.
"Why do you guys play those stupid games!"
I was saying something when one of the kids broke my train of thought.
"Go play DDR or something."
The laughter was contagious and even as much as I could supress it a short giggle came out of my mouth.
"You guys are jerks."
Then she walked away.
The Diablo 3 craze has caught onto me same as the Diablo 2 craze did it to me 10 years ago.
There are some people who really have been hating on it but I am rather happy with it.
I had some free time before so I was planning on submitting some art to "Portrait of a Champion" contest.
The sketching was easy, photoshopping it wasn't.
I ended up not even submitting what I came up with.
But here they are:
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