Just occurred to me that we don't really talk about hardware much around here, even though it's a necessity for this hobby of ours. Got the occasional "What should I buy" thread, and there's the recent Ryzen and DOS audio threads, but other than that we sort of glaze over the shiny stuff. Figured, then, that we could have a thread to talk about the hardware we've acquired recently.

If y'all are interested, at least.

Been on a bit of a buying binge lately, having picked up a tasty Sager 17" laptop with a GTX 1070 late last year, and also got the new Thrustmaster HOTAS combo based on the T-16000 that so many people have recommended. Finally replaced my worn out Wingman joystick.

Today we replaced a fried desktop with a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet PC. Got the base model with the m3 CPU, Intel 515 graphics, 4GB RAM, and a 128 GB SSD. Curious to see how well it handles games though it's primarily for her to use.

Anything new in your giant pile o' hardware? Big, small, doesn't matter. Even little hardware can make a big improvement on gaming enjoyment.

Does an External HD count?

Not very exciting.

It counts. You're putting games on there, right? What did you get?

Seagate Expansion

I don't worry about losing GOG and my games, but you know how crap my bandwidth is, so with this I can uninstall something like Jade Empire or Witcher and clear up my regular HD without having to download the whole damn thing again next time I want to play it.

I can relate to speed woes. You get creative to avoid multiple downloads of the same stuff.


Wouldn't mind either finding a nice set of headphones, or else getting the old Sennheisers reconditioned. The ear muffs and driver foam are really worn out, but they still sound great. Just not nearly as comfortable as they used to be.

I got an $8 (general-purpose) mouse a couple months ago to replace the borrowed one I had been using; unfortunately, it turned out to be more of a lateral move than an improvement. While the buttons work fine (the left button on the old mouse was getting kinda wonky and unpredictable), the scroll wheel is a broken piece of shit, often scrolling the screen (or whatever) down/backward when I'm trying to scroll up/forward, and vice versa. :/

Headphones, sennheiser 598...second pair.

Samsung M3 slimline 1TB portable HDD, cheap as hell.

After 20+ years of playing pc games i just bought my first ever gamepad this week (the Xbox 360 one), feels odd but for slower games its kinda relaxing to sit back and play with it.

My most recent acquisition was a new enclosure for an external HDD because the controller card gave out.

Got a new (at least at the time it was released) laptop last year, but didn't really get anything this year as far as hardware goes.

After 30+ years of playing pc games i just bought my second gamepad last week (DualShock 4).

Getting a GTX1070 tomorrow (happy birthday to me)

Also recently got a USB3 driven monitor (it was cheap at CEX).

My mouse is quite broken and I'd need to fix it or buy a new one..

But I hate buying mice, as far as I can tell they all suck.

I bought a GTX 1060 half a year and a G402 Hyperion Fury (mouse) two months ago. That's the first hardware I bought after getting my curent PC which is over five years old now (i5 2500k and 8 GB RAM, which is still more than enough for gaming). If nothing breaks, my next hardware purchase will be a new system in two years (depending on how good my CPU will keep up with games). I'm not buying new hardware very often.