Category: Guide

Hot on the heels of our recent popular comparison post which compared a gaming PC offered by Harvey Norman to a PC that we offer – here’s a detailed write-up comparing us to Origin PC! Let’s get into it then.

(more…)

While Minecraft is a hugely popular game that gets hundreds of thousands of hours gameplay every month from gamers of all ages all around the planet, the PC requirements are not very demanding. If you’re using a PC to read this article, the chances are that you can play it on that PC – give it a shot! If you can’t run it on your current PC, or don’t have a PC yet; please continue reading and we’ll tell you how to go about making a cheap PC to play Minecraft. Hint: with our current pricing and part availability, you could have us professionally build you a PC capable of playing Minecraft for $541.

(more…)

By specialising in custom gaming PCs the value we can offer over other stores in terms of customisability, performance, price, service and quality is unrivalled. There are definitely some stores out there come close in some areas, but when it comes to a custom gaming PCs specifically, we can confidently claim to be Australia’s #1.

To highlight one of the biggest offenders we’ve picked out Harvey Norman’s ‘Pryron’ series of gaming PCs, particularly the one for sale now at the time of this post, the Storm Scout II. To compare and contrast we have put together a custom Valkyrie PC using the Evatech.com.au website, PC ID 64345 (link). This might seem a little harsh, but I’ll stick to the facts, break it down part by part and try to let you make your own decision. (more…)

There’s a couple of common misconceptions that many gaming PC buyers have when it comes to picking out the right PC and we thought it best to try and dispel some of the myths that might negatively effect your decision making when it comes to selecting the right components for your next custom gaming PC.

Now the following could be considered ‘overly generalized’ and yes there are always the odd exception to the general rule, but this article is just to point the less savvy shopper in the right direction and should be only the first stepping stone in your pre-purchase research.

(more…)

We have had a lot of customers recently, (and we mean A LOT) ordering custom gaming PCs just to play Star Citizen. So much so that with all the research we’ve had to do to answer their questions, we feel as though we can pretty accurately make hardware recommendations to suit your performance expectations.

We tested the game with FRAPS running to gather frame rate data, swapping in different hardware and played around with the graphics presets, so lets get straight in to it.

 

Q: What does it take to run Star Citizen at at 60FPS on “Very High” presets at 1080P? A: An i5 4590, 16GB of RAM and a GTX980

THE GPU : In the games current state (v1.1), the GTX 980 is the only video card that can pull this off. Averaging 61FPS in our tests and corroborated with similar numbers from multiple benchmarks you can find online however many speculate that future patches with deliver engine optimization will improve performance greatly across the board. Unfortunately there is no real time frame given by the developers for when these optimizations will occur and exactly how much performance we can expect.

CPU & MEMORY : Assuming engine optimization is coming, you might get away with only 8GB of DDR3 but there are multiple areas of the game where we noted a significant performance increase when we jumped up to 16GB. As with most games, the RAM frequency doesn’t make any significant impact to frame rates or load times. As for the CPU, we tested both an i5 4590 and an i7 4970, both of which performed almost identically.

Q: What does it take to run Star Citizen at at 30+FPS on “Medium” presets at 1080P? A: An i5 4460, 8GB of RAM and a GTX 750TI

THE GPU : Again, in the games current state (v1.1), our MSI GTX 750TI 2GB OC manged to average 35FPS under these conditions only dropping as lows as a very playable 30FPS.

CPU & MEMORY : Assuming engine optimization is coming, you might get away with only 8GB of DDR3 but there are multiple areas of the game where we noted a significant performance increase when we jumped up to 16GB. As with most games, the RAM frequency doesn’t make any significant impact to frame rates or load times. As for the CPU, we tested both an i5 4590 and an i7 4970, both of which performed almost identically.

Q: What does it take to run Star Citizen at 4K? A: Don’t Bother (Yet)

SLI factory overclocked GTX980’s (That’s $1,600+ alone of GPU power) still struggled, dipping to as low as 12FPS on a and barely keeping above 30FPS on average even when paired with 16GB of RAM and an i7 4790 CPU. Future patches will hopefully make 4K viable but right now it’s just not.

 

Testing Notes : All tests where run under Windows 8.1 on a Adata SP900 SSD and the latest available drivers from Nvidia.com as of March 31st. All video cards used where provided by MSI and our Memory used was from the G.Skill RipjawsX series. All frame data was collected in the Vanduul Swarm mode of the game.

 

Final Thoughts

If you want to jump in early and start playing today, for a good 1080P experience be prepared to invest in a GTX970 or 980 and a 4690 or 4770 Intel CPU. Oh and if long load times bother you, make sure you have a large enough SSD to fit both your Windows install and the game! The Star Citizen client is expected to eventually reach around the 100GB size according to it’s developer in a recent post on the game’s official forums.

The stunning popularity of this game (raising $77 million USD since it’s kickstarter launch to date) should be ample funding for developer RSI continue adding content and optimizing performance for a long time to come, so we don’t expect this game’s popularity to start fading any time soon.

To customise a gaming to to play Star Citizen, click here.