As some of you may already know due to my PS4 post, my main gaming PC is dead.
Completely fried out probably due to a thunderstorm or some energy anomaly. Either way, I present to you this: My new and temporary gaming and work setup!
As you can see, it's... not much.
I bought this laptop with some HIVE I had last year and it was totally worth it because it was cheap, so as a companion to my main rig it was a great setup. But as a main rig itself? Not so much.
This i3 6006u barely edges out the i3 3217U I had in 2015, which is crazy. The HD 520 is also really underpowered and weak and unlike with some Ryzen laptops I've messed with, there's nothing I can do to squeeze out more performance out of this.
That being said however, this is the reason why I'm not even running Windows 10 or 11 (through Rufus so it can work on older hardware) at all and instead went with my favourite Linux distro: CachyOS!
It's optimized for gaming, with great kernel level tweaks and a bunch of tools that make stuff simpler and easier.
With it being optimized for gaming, that means it's also great at doing other stuff. So even though I'm running a 120GB 5400RPM HDD, this is still totally usable as a day-to-day machine. Browsing the web, playing simple games and emulation on here are totally doable.
Even some things I didn't expect to work, worked. Like virtualization, where I had to run a full Windows 10 VM to patch an SSD so it could work on a Xbox 360 via SSDmaker.
This is how my desktop looks, a poor man's MacOS. But unlike MacOS, there's no Apple BS and it's really really lightweight (not that MacOS is particularly hard to run, but this is even better).
I love using the Maté desktop and customizing it to my needs.
Unfortunately this is not how I see my desktop...
Yup, my TV has these weird ass lines going through the top. Luckily it doesn't bother me too much, but it's certainly ugly.
Anyways, what about the games? You know, the main point of this community.
Well, they certainly... run.
I've been playing mostly small indie games and older titles because I simply don't have space on my hard drive. Luckily I have a hard drive bay on the DVD slot, but no hard drive in there because I don't have any money for that right now.
So that leaves me with a measly 13ish gigabytes of space right now. If this were Windows it'd certainly be complaining about low disk space lol.
I have tried some harder to run titles like Battlefield 4 on an external hard drive (which is now currently being used by my PS4) and it ran at 35-45FPS on low settings 720p, which is actually prety surprising and I'm sure I can squeeze out more performance by lowering the resolution even further.
I can't wait to get a larger hard drive to put in this thing so I can run some benchmarks and share with you guys.
I also have 2 games on Lutris, Guitar Hero 3 with the BetterGH3 mod, that runs really really well at 1080p and SWAT 4 + its expansion which I play with my friend using Hamachi (Haguichi on Linux) and that also works well.
But the real star of the show on this laptop is emulation.
I have a bunch of 1G1R romsets downloaded and Retroarch runs all of that flawlessly. Unfortunately since I don't have much space I've confined myself to 16bit + GBA and lower, since the roms are just smaller.
Once I get a proper large HDD I'll be sure to add PS1 and N64 games to the list (maybe even Dreamcast if that runs well).
But we'll see, the future is uncertain. It might take me months and months to get a new PC so I better get used to this one. And I guess for simple stuff and being able to post on HIVE, it's already great.
However I do have my goals for it. Such as an SSD, a large HDD and a new monitor/TV.
The portability aspect of this is also not very well since the hinge is broken and that makes the screen a little loose. It's nothing particularly worrisome since it's an easy fix, I'll be buying the new hinge myself, but eh, for now I'll just this a desktop.
Thanks for reading! If you'll excuse me, I'll go play some Hades on this thing, that runs really well, very well optimized game that I recommend to y'all!
Last played a month ago, but I've been itching to get back into this