The trilogy with Bale certainly made that clear haha.

I’ve used them for a while too. Sometimes they’ll have weird keys super cheap. Like I was able to grab Dark Souls 3 + both DLC’s for like $16 or something way back when.

Generally I don’t buy anything else other than Phillips. They’re usually bulletproof if you don’t get the smart bulbs. I’ve not had a Phillips fail in ~10 years. But that’s a sample size of like 30 or so bulbs.

Like the other commenter said, you can get some pretty good deals due to the recent issues.

Just don’t bother with a 13th/14th gen intel right now. Either go 12th gen intel, or straight up AMD which is what I’d recommend.

Source

Yep. When I moved into my house the previous owner had used all garbage Walmart LED’s. I think I had one fail each month and just bought a bunch on sale from Phillips eventually.

Most common failure was the driver. So they turned into strobe lights lol. Most annoying failure ever.

And more importantly, not every LED is dimmer compatible. Sometimes they’re super picky or just plain don’t work.

Take a look at Keychron. They have a lot to offer for around your budget and they go on sale frequently.

Are you looking to be able to swap switches out? If so you will need to find hot swappable switches.

If you care about backlighting they might be a little more expensive. But Keychron is reasonable. I’ve had their K2 for years and it has a better feel in it vs Corsair or Razer stuff in my opinion.

I feel like mines the opposite. I pay $20/mo and we get access to a huge and well taken care of community pool, park, and basketball court. They also host community parties for each holiday that you can go to. They certainly allow you to get your $20 worth. Idk how they do it.

When it comes to architectural control, they’re pretty lax. We’ve got some vibrant and eclectic houses, but they are well put together. I haven’t found anything yet they won’t approve if you stay within a standard palette offering when it comes to shingles, siding etc. But some of these colors are yellows and reds so it’s not all boring either.

They also don’t allow signage in the yard to be displayed. So political signs etc will get you a violation. But it’s just a “remove by x date” and there’s no penalty if you do. I don’t mind this rule.

We do have to keep grass cut to an extent, but my neighbors cut it once a month at most and it’s usually a non issue. Honestly, other than safety things I’ve not seen anything crazy in mine. The two lady’s that operate it are super nice.

Sometimes the afflictions didn’t trigger properly like accidentally healing an enemy because decay was applied same turn etc. also turn order and initiative is impossible to predict. In a 4 person co-op game there must always be an alternating turn order regardless of number of players. So basically we’ve had players skipped for two whole rounds because the AI gets to go again. It’s fairly consistent in that regard. It’s frustrating because it’s usually a different person each session that just gets entirely skipped over for almost the entire fight.

And to be honest, I liked the action/bonus action mechanic as it makes the turns go faster. We just did a 4 player bg3 campaign earlier this year and the fights went way faster.

And the crafting mechanic has a high learning curve.

I did find the physical/magic armor mechanic different. I don’t have any real opinion either way with it.

Having played both, there are some really nice quality of life changes in BG3 that will make this way better. Also Div 2 rules were weird.

Anything mini led with local dimming and HDR will be more than enough at a lower budget. Hisense has some pretty nice ones.

Check out rtings to get a general idea of features and their usefulness.

With budget pre builts, you’re usually sacrificing performance to an extent of cheap power supplys (that can blow up) and a tier or two lesser graphics unit for the same price as you would building it yourself.

Honestly, if you’re happy with the performance the steam deck provides then you should stick with that long enough to either realize your need for a purpose built desktop, or put it in a gen 2 steam deck down the road.

Yea Floatplane.

I feel like in comparison to Starfield, ES6 should be smaller and more compact which should alleviate a lot of the other complaints I’ve seen.

At this point the hype alone will sell it. There may be some apprehensive players since starfield, but I don’t think it’ll impact them too much.

Also elder scrolls being their big IP, they kind of don’t have the wiggle room to screw this up.

Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. It’s hard to think which I played first. Probably Doom.

Is that why I can find some brands in Colorado and not in Michigan? Or are there just really that many brands?

Congrats!

At this point I’d just say enjoy the new build.

Easy first steps. Enable the XMP profile in the bios to get the most out of your ram since ryzen is very sensitive to that.

Otherwise, I’d leave it as-is. Maybe grab 3DMark on sale ($5 or so) from steam and bench your system just to make sure you’re within expected results compared to others.

PBO for the cpu pretty much gets you 90% there on your max cpu overclock plus a little more voltage than you’d have with a manual one. The X3D cpus are really thick with the stacked cache so they do require decent cooling compared to non X3D skus. So it may just run a little warm but nothing crazy.

The big thing these days for gpu’s is undervolting. I’ve been able to cut out 50w or so from my 3080 with no discernible performance hit when coupled with my 5600x. Check out the Optimum YouTube channel (formerly Optimum Tech) on his undervolting results. His videos are a little older but are applicable to most gpus that are power hungry.

I think I still have copies of GMR around here…….from my nostalgic memory I thought they were the better publication.

Soft plaque forms like the other comment said from bacteria excrement.

It then hardens and becomes impossible for a regular brush to get rid of within 24ish hours. It’s why you should get regular cleanings and brush twice a day. And floss.

It’s going to make heavy based melee builds much less annoying.