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WELCOME
Welcome to the true home of PC Gaming. After hours we play games. Consoles need not apply.
The old news page is now deprecated as we will be using a facebook page for the news looking forward.
Our GTX 260 continues to be a viable gaming card. Steam recently reported the 9800 GT is the current most popular common card found in a gaming rig. See the NVIDIA speculative roadmap for more information. Our NVIDIA driver blog is very popular.
For fun we have installed some old games on the netbook so see what works. We have added a table for the games we are attempting to play. The netbook has a WEI of 3 for the GMA 3150.
Revenue for 2012 is already ahead of 2011. See our roadmap.
Thanks to those who have helped keep this site alive! Thank you!
NEW GAMES
Several new games are now available starting in May 2012 so we have already expanded the 2012 games catalog.
You can preorder most of the upcoming games which will be shipped when the game is finally released.
AION is now available as a free to play game. Blacklight: Retribution is a new free to play shooter. Tribes Ascend is available. Microsoft Flight is now available for free from Live Games.
We have also rolled out a store for those who want to grab a new game. We will continue to retain the older game collections so that those with a limited budget can find a bargain.
7554 is now available. If you want to get it with PayPal use Emobigames.vn, it costs 400,000₫ (đồng) which is about $20 which is a good deal. They are using the Amazon EC2 to fulfill PC downloads. The game publisher accepts PayPal and they send the game key by email. 7554 is in Vietnamese with English subtitles available. Other Vietnam period games have frequently featured native dialogs.
SUPPORT
We lack the resources to buy every game publishers release, there are far too many. A gift of a game coupon is much appreciated. See our game wish list.
Upgrading the gaming machine is another expensive undertaking. Realistically we need a few more gaming grade video cards along with other components. High performance power supplies are vital.
WHITE PAPERS
NVIDIA has now released the dual GPU GTX 690. At a MSRP of $999, it's not a graphics card for everyone. But for enthusiasts who demand the very best and gamers who want a graphics card that will last for generations, the GeForce GTX 690 represents the ultimate in gaming. For now.
The HD7970 is now available. It features 2048 cores running at 925 Mhz. The card achieves about 3.5 TFLOPS IEE754-SP. The card comes with 3 GB of DDR5 which should make it a stellar workstation card. Game comparisons show the HD 7970 to outperform the GTX 580 almost across the board. Board is PCI Express 3 which is backwards compatible. Power is < 260W loaded and < 3W idle. Has a DVI, HDMI and 2 x miniDisplayPort connectors.
AMD has been having problems with marketing. We would like to have graphs of 15 different gaming Radeon cards all playing the same benchmark from a couple of blockbuster games so that users can see what an upgrade can do. Metro 2033 is one of our favorite benchmarks.
We now are offering an NVIDIA driver blog. The goal is to summarize problems, if any, that we identify with games. Obviously we do not have every games out there but we have many popular titles that can help identify issues.
We also have updated our NVIDIA speculation page with roadmap information. We apologize for the corporate video, but we will interpret for gamers.
We are now benchmarking some of the games with the intent on building tables with various display adapters for a given game. Benchmarks are becoming a core interest among avid gamers. We will need several gaming video cards to be able to provide charts and graphs.
Metro 2033, Crysis Warhead and Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason are the 3 most demanding games that we presently use for benchmarking. Darkest of Days has a PhysX benchmark that we may use as well. Even though Metro 2033 is an older title, it still holds up as a very demanding game that can beat up on the latest HD 7970.
We occasionally grab games from discount bins simply as we lack funds to buy everything in sight. Each year we plan to make a new catalog, so over time older pages will have discounts galore for those who have a more modest budget.
SERVER
The server load is now better managed with the X2 processor. Still server load can be heavy with the growing popularity of the site.
Now that SSD prices are lower we may consider one for the web server to manage the databases with.
DNS
Intermittent DNS problems have been a long term problem. Google by far is the largest source of traffic here. Bookmarks are the next largest block. Web site referrals are now a very thin piece of the pie chart.
Part of the problem is that our registrar has had technical difficulties galore. We hope they can resolve the problems but assembling a stable server is complex. The TK domain is now the 3rd most widely used. There are now some 220++ million registered domains across all top level domains.
We installed DNS server on the web server and we added Google's public servers, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to the forwards pool. In total we now have over 10 forwards in case of problems.
We are considering using a Linux VM for dedicated DNS services. Such a VM can use a measly 256 MB of RAM. BIND is the standard DNS server package for Linux. Linux is easily managed with a browser and console access is standard. Hyper-V is a reasonable hypervisor and there are many competing solutions.
SUPPORT
The new server is loaded very heavily at times. We use AMD as they offer easier incremental upgrades. See the roadmap for a look at how we are looking forward.