The problem with high-end PC gaming

Within the last year, I’ve been on a quest to build a new PC inside my Lian-Li DK-04X Desk Chassis and it’s been a great ride so far, though, not without its issues. Admittedly, while I am going above and beyond what anyone needs to spend and put time into for their own PC build, the following article still goes through some of the issue that PC gaming can have on the average person who just wants to play a video game.

The idea has been going around for a long time that PC gaming is superior to consoles in every way and that more people should get into PC gaming. While technically true (the best kind of truth?), there are some things most people don’t consider when they want to head down the path of PC gaming, especially once they get into high-end hardware.

When you purchase a console, you are buying a package deal that is pre-built and standardised to exact specifications. This means, that in the rare instance where something goes wrong, the problem can be easily resolved and the person who has to deal with any of the technical matters is not you, the customer. If a console dies or becomes faulty, it is up to the store or manufacturer to solve the problem. In most cases, it’s just a simple case of replacing the console or fixing the faulty parts and returning it back to the customer.

As consoles have become more high-end, this has become more common, however, the process is still simple. You either plug the console into power and via HDMI and turn it on and have it work, or something has gone wrong and you get a replacement and the replacement will most likely work. Owning a console does not require any technical knowledge, it just requires you to be able to plug it in and turn it on to gain the experience of playing a video game.

Recently PC gaming has gone into the trend of supplying gaming systems that run with this same idea of a pre-built and standardised product sold to customers, however, it’s never that simple with a PC as it is with consoles since the hardware and software environment for PCs can never be standardised to the point of uniformity compared with a console.

The problem with PC gaming, whether it’s console equivalent hardware or high-end PC hardware, is that when something goes wrong, you need to have the technical knowledge to be able to deal with it. In addition, for those who build their own PC, you are required to foresee problems that you may have beforehand.

Don’t get me wrong, PC hardware has become so much easier to deal with in recent years, however, it’s important to remember that PC gaming has a much higher learning curve and requires the user to have a certain level of competency with for when things do go wrong.

Let’s take a look at the things I’ve had to deal with with my new PC build, which is the fourth PC I have built in my entire life. It is also, by far, the hardest PC build I have done, with the easiest being the first PC I ever built. The trend seems to be that the higher-end the components, the more complex the build becomes and the more chance there is of something going wrong. Though, by this point, I consider myself quite experienced with PC hardware, so I was confident enough to go ahead and make it all work.

During the build I had several issues, from bent pins on a USB 3 header to the power supply simply not working out of the box. The bent pin issue was fixed easily enough, but the power supply issue, on the other hand, was a little more troublesome. I had to do a lot of testing on the power supply and almost had to RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization, for returning the product to get it refunded, replaced or repaired) it before I found the solution. It turned out that the power supply had shipped with a faulty 24-pin cable. Luckily, I already had custom cables on hand and they worked fine. However, before I found the solution, I spent hours troubleshooting the problem.

The second issue I’ve faced with this PC build comes from the new EVGA RTX 2080 XC GAMING Graphics Card that I got last week. In fact, it arrived the day that various PC journalists over at Gamers Nexus, etc, started to report about issues with the RTX 20xx series of graphics cards cropping up all over the place. At the time, I hoped I’d get lucky and none of the issues reported would happen to me since they were primarily happening to 2080 Ti cards… however, well…

For a week, my PC ran with an RTX 2080, but now I’m back down to my old reliable friend, my EVGA GTX 760 SC. And yeah, I would absolutely love to get my hands on a clearly more reliable 1080 Ti, but that time has now passed since the stocks of 1080 Ti’s out there in the wild have all become extinct.

From the first day that I installed the RTX 2080, I experienced problems that I brushed off as a simple driver issue that could be resolved with a clean install of the Nvidia drivers… which worked, for a short time.

Over the course of the week, I noticed that when I put my PC to sleep and woke it back up, only some of the displays would turn back on while others would not be detected at all by Windows. I would end up having to shut down the PC and perform a cold boot for all four of the monitors to work again. An annoyance, but a red flag in terms of the reliability of this product.

On top of that, I bought and downloaded more and more high-end games to test out with my new graphics card along with Grand Theft Auto V and experienced problems running the game. Again, Gamers Nexus has confirmed through their own investigations, that many others have experienced the same issues that I have with the game, but it gets worse.

A week and a half after installing the card into my PC, the card finally had enough and decided to not detect my main monitor at all. I was in the middle of running benchmark tests on it, with stock settings out of the box when it finally decided that it didn’t want to detect my main monitor permanently. The monitor began to stutter and turn off and on before it died entirely.

This is where I started troubleshooting the problem, performing a clean install of the Nvidia drivers multiple times in between restarting the PC and cold booting it, testing the cables, testing different monitors using different cables, testing the RTX 2080 on a different computer, testing it on a different computer with a fresh install of Windows 10, putting in my old GTX 760 into both computers that I tested and testing the screens to see if they worked… and they did work with the GTX 760.

After hours upon hours of testing, I concluded that the two PCs tested work fine, my monitors work fine, the cables are fine… it’s the RTX 2080 that is faulty. Which, if you’re reading this and know enough about the issues with the RTX 20xx series, is not surprising at all.

However, this is where I started to think, “What if I didn’t know enough about PCs to deal with what just happened?” and that’s when I began to think about the learning curve required for PC gaming, not just high-end PC gaming, but the knowledge required to work with PC hardware in general.

That’s why I strongly believe that most people should just stick with consoles, they may be comparatively more expensive in terms of the price in relation to the power of the hardware you get, but they tend to be more reliable and more straight forward to work with. It’s simply a box you buy that plugs into your TV to play video games, no more, no less.

But for those of you out there who do want to get into PC gaming, even at the lower-end of the scale, you do need to do one important thing:

Learn.

Spend time learning about how all this stuff works and all the things that can go wrong and start small when you jump in so that when things do go wrong (and they will), you won’t panic and will learn to troubleshoot the problems when they occur. Also realise that there are A LOT of resources you can find on the Internet to help you. If you do have a problem with your hardware or software or some combination of the two, know that there is most likely someone else out there who has or had the same problem as you and has asked about it on various PC forums. In most cases, the solution can be found through some very simple searches.

There are a whole lot of resources on the Internet about building a PC and dealing with various issues you can come across, from articles to forum posts and videos that go into a whole lot of different topics. Immerse yourself in as much knowledge as you can, go onto these sites and start asking questions and gain as much knowledge and experience as you can.

PC hardware and gaming does have a pretty steep learning curve, but at the same time, there is a lot of support out there for people who want to get into PC gaming.

The real problem with PC gaming is when someone wants to get into it and doesn’t want to learn what is required of them when things go wrong. If you have the drive to get into this more technical side of gaming and have the money, you also need to come prepared with knowledge as well.

In the meantime, my RTX 2080 is being RMA’d and I’m going to try my luck on a replacement unit. If all else fails, though, I may end up getting myself a lower end graphics card, perhaps a standard GTX 1080 until I’m confident that all the bugs have been ironed out of the RTX 20xx series and I can go ahead and pull the trigger on two EVGA RTX 2080 Ti FTW3’s.