My new gaming setup... All in one place.

Hello all. For the past few years, I've generally had whatever consoles I owned hooked up to the TV in the living room, and had my gaming computer hooked up to whatever monitor I had in the spare room or bedroom. I finally decided to change this over the past few days, and finally finished a little while ago. I'd like to detail a bit first.

I was gaming on PC with a 22" LCD, an AMD X2 4600 (2.4Ghz), 4GB of DDR2 800, and a BFG 8800GTS 512MB OC video card. In with my PC was the PS3, because my monitor has HDMI in, and the 30" CRT HDTV in the living room only had component as well as being limited to 480p and 1080i (no support for 720p). Now, out in the living room was the Xbox 360 and a crappy P4 PC just to watch Hulu and watch video files.

Now it's a bit different:



In this picture, you can see I've got the PS3 on the left, the Xbox 360, and a new mini gaming box all hooked up to my new 32" LCD and my old Kenwood 600W surround system, which is just as awesome as the first day I bought it. You can also see the corner of my Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters poster, as well.

If you're really perceptive, you can see I've decided to use the Origami Experience for Vista UMPCs as my launcher for the computer. It will make everything easier for people when they come over if they want to get on the internet or play a few games, plus I really like the music player interface. I also got that plugin for Firefox called NoSquint, which basically zooms to 120% by default and is a lifesaver.

On the table in front of the TV is the new wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse set. I'm happy I found a cheap one with actual media keys.

Now there's not much difference to the gaming computer, but it's enough to run almost everything on high... except Crisis of course. :) I replaced the AMD with a new Intel board and an E5200 dual core chip, which is basically a 2.5Ghz C2D with less L2 cache and a little slower FSB. It has the same Wolfdale core as the one I'd have loved to have gotten but was twice the cost. I'm thinking about pin modding it, but I'm not certain how that will do on this specific CPU.

I'm still rocking the 8800GTS, and unfortunately had to split the RAM from the other system until I can order some more from Newegg to bring it up to 4GB. It utterly kills the AMD X2 I had. Something like a 600 - 700 point difference in the CPU Mark scores, and the games are running noticeably smoother. I also got ahold of a couple USB 360 controllers so that any split screen gaming on the computer that is good with controllers can be had with ease.



This is me in my big green gaming chair pretending to play the PS3 for the picture. As you can see, I remembered to turn on the controller before the picture for maximum realism. Of course, like all my things, the chair is being slowly destroyed by the cat since I have this deficiency that keeps me from ever remembering to buy him a scratching post. I actually almost killed him yesterday when I caught him pissing on the power adapters for the router, modem, and 360... but I didn't. It's probably my fault for paying more attention to games than to him.



This is my pathetic little gaming collection, however, it's not so bad since I actually play A LOT of my games on the PC. Just much less physical evidence of gaming since the advent of no-cd cracks, ISO makers, and trash cans. On the left are the PS3 games sitting on a few PSX ones. I made custom cases for the PSX games since the smaller CD cases didn't really fit in with everything else. On the right are the 360 games sitting on top of the few GameCube games I have remaining. I have no GameCube. There is sadness in the land since I gave away my original GC when I got the Wii, then I sold the Wii and have no GC now.

I also need a PS2. Badly. I really want to play Persona 4.



I also got the component cables for the PSP so I could play Mother 3 and Minish Cap on a bigger screen when I'm at home without needing to run an emulator on the extremely non-power saving computer.

And that's pretty much it. As an aside, if anyone's in Central Florida and they want a 30" CRT HDTV (still works great), let me know and maybe we can work out a trade or something.