New Toy, Getting Used to It

Hello everyone,

I've been buying a couple of things ...

There's one. Hoping it'll be good, haven't put it together yet. Been a rough feeling few days, although I think some of that is due to pressure around my head from my poorly ear. Yesterday was headache time, not quite sure why I don't have the headache now !

It was the Le Mans race this weekend, although it was a little different from usual. The race was being run to the same rules, although there were less practice and qualifying sessions. We were also missing some of the competitors in the GTE classes as Ford have pulled out and Corvette couldn't come over due to pandemic. I did get some sleep this morning though and then watched the rest of the race on time delay. It was a good race too, with incidents happening typically when things had settled down.

There was a bit of an end of an era feel about it too ... This was the last Le Mans with the LMP Le Mans Prototype cars before LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hypercar) takes over. It should lead to better racing, with more manufacturers coming in. LMP got a bit too expensive in the last few years, with the hybrid systems coming in and manufacturers pulling out. LMDh should be a good reset.

Nurburgring next weekend should be interesting and there will be many more cars on the much longer circuit.

Oh, I did a start of a Stellaris game overnight as well, I haven't been impressed with what they've been doing in the game lately. The changes brought in intentionally don't seem great and the bugs being introduced just don't get fixed. That's the disappointing thing. But it was good to be in there again with the Nomnivorian Swarm having a good start eating one of the nearby races. Hey ! They declared war on me ... We just bit back. Literally.

What's the new toy ?

There we go, it's an X52 Pro flightstick and throttle unit.

Dwagon included for scale. They're a chunky pair ... So chunky, I think I'll be acquiring a board to put them on like an extender to the keyboard tray they get put on. When the throttle is full forwards, the 4 way switch clashes with the main deck of my desk. The mounting board will let me pull it backwards a bit to give access.

It's got lots of buttons ... and lights too. I'll be looking into how to get useful information out of a little multi function display that's on the throttle. Thoughts so far ... and this may read like a mini review so :

Disclosure note - bought from Logitech, not a free product.

Main flight stick has a really smooth nice action and that wrist rest you see there is moveable upwards for different sized hands. I've had to lift it up so I can access the switches and buttons on top. There's a lovely two stage firing trigger but I wasn't getting on with the lower pinkie trigger that's at the bottom of the stick. Felt like it was getting in the way. The disc at the bottom of the stick also interferes a little with moving the stick off the centre, although that might be a New Thing thing. The obstruction relieves if you rotate the disc, so it's an interaction with the spring.

Throttle is similarly sensitive with moving off the centre, although that could be New Thing thing. It's useful to set up a little dead zone.

There's a nice little thumb mouse on the throttle too, with button and scroll wheel too. I thought this would be great for the discovery scanner system in Elite, where I think stretching to use my main mouse there is damaging me. Having a mouse on the throttle is an amazing concept but I wasn't getting the wiring in my brain to match up with using it effectively. Perhaps it would have worked with more training but I just went "Nah, can't be bothered, ditch it for old method".

On the whole, positive. It feels solid and well made, although oddly it isn't holding to the desk like the Thrustmaster Hotas X did. Perhaps that's because the bases are a little shorter and the controls are bigger, so there's more leverage compared to the base. This should improve when I acquire the board to put them on.

Oh and it's giving me some more options I didn't have before to get better screenshots. Before, I'd have to pose the ship and then move the camera, I wouldn't be able to go back to moving the ship. I can do that now :-D.

Talking of screenshots ...

I left things last week at the Dryau Awesomes and a short hop happened on Thursday taking me to the Keelback Rings. That's a pair of ringed planets that orbit each other quite closely, with distinctive colouration on the rings. Pretty.

Same place, at log in when I returned today. One thing that's simulated is the orbital period of the planets and moons. So when I land, I'll look for a good landing spot that's got interesting surface features ... plus a backlighting sun to bring out the colours of the ship.

Sometimes there isn't a sun around to provide the backlight, you can just see the ship there on the left, with a nebula being lensed around the black hole.

It was a good little session actually, whereas I've been tiring quickly on other runs, I did a few hops tonight via one of the XTE black holes above, finding this ringed waterworld :

I am definitely liking the blue and orange colouration of Zoomnarr. The pop much better than I thought they would.

And my destination tonight was Neon Beacon, one of a few very rare gas giants that has neon green colouration.

I found a very rugged moon to perch upon too. (Although for some reason didn't F10 to save the screenshot of me looking at the gas giant from there ! Oops, next time).

Promising start, took a while to figure out what the new buttons did ... and remap where I wasn't going to get on with them !

More screenshots later and I'll put the Marble Parkour and Lego things together as well at some point. That's going to be waiting for hands ...

I'm feeling my right wrist a bit, although that might be an impact of getting my hand in around that pinkie switch. I've also had the pain again on my left hand, where the knuckles were damaged by over aggressive practice in cricket. That's something that comes and goes, when they bad, the insides of my knuckles feels like there's a broken bone in there ... that was yesterday, they're ok today.

We'll see how those go.

In the meantime though, those virus numbers are going up again here in the UK ... Stay safe everyone, avoid the idiots, wear the masks, hope you and yours stay well.

Appreciation time !

Hello everyone,

Apparently it's International Women's Appreciation Day today. Which gives me a good excuse to say nice things about people. But first ... a thumbnail is required ...

Ladies of NASA ! Did I really never post these ? Oops. This was a good little set with some interesting history within the material that came with it.

Let's start with a few amazing people who I know. First up there is the ever wonderful LTK, who listens to the jokes, natters away and loves the various screenshots coming through. And then there's the Lark, who has been a great cinema buddy (not much lately although I really enjoyed The Handmaiden - special film), hopefully there will be another Comic Con this year although that depends on the organisers and a certain virus that's doing the rounds. They've both been amazing friends over the last few years.

As for virus stuff - I think I'm outside of the danger period that I was keeping an eye on ! The incubation period is supposed to be something like 14 days and I'm ok. It's now 14 days since getting off the flight from Canada and I was seeing that as the danger period times. Mind you, I did forgo heading into Cardiff on Friday but that was more because it was later than ideal and there was nothing interesting in the Cardiff cinemas, less due to the case of virus that's been announced for someone in Cardiff.

Still, it's ok to be cautious. (Not ok to be crazy about it though, there's too much panic buying happening at the moment).

Back to ladies ! Special mention for the Sleepymum and Sleepysister too. I'll see them again in a few weeks for the Mothers Day weekend.

Special mentions for the Purple Pixie, Snow Queen, Fork Lady, Alex, Sarai and Krinza. Especially Krinza who helped me through a few really rough times with the various Warcraft dramas that happened over the years.

Before I go any further though, if you know me and don't see your name here ... that's cos you are far more amazing than my brain is and it's full of holes due to cricket balls.

There's a few amazing ladies who have recently joined the team I'm in too, in the project, in commercial and in finance too. And then there are the Finance Angels who have been extremely patient over the years with me too and perhaps taught me a few things along the way too.

We get fantastic support from the ladies in the wider teams at work too, although we're switching teams at the moment so we're switching to different people to help us out.

Mind you, there's also a couple out in the wider world of people who make it possible for us to keep doing what we do. I've named one of my ships Strength of Atlas but these two are definitely the strength of atlas. One of them has pulled an airliner down a runway for charity ...

Where to next ? I'm definitely still well invested in the gaming world and am doing that thing again where I have two streams on. (One's on laptop). Huge shout outs for :

Fuzzyfreaks - who is always massive crazy fun watching the streams. It's always something different, something amusing, maybe shocking too, always whole hearted. May she keep streaming for many years to come. When she does role play streams, you're never bothered if the plot doesn't advance because it's just too much fun watching her character interaction.
Also Teacakes - who is as lovely as both varieties of nommy teacake.
HelloitsKolo - is on the laptop at the moment playing Breathedge, a wonderful human being who is just so nice ! She's also built a wonderful, generous community who just did wonderful things for the Special Effect charity.
HeyChrissa - wonderful Chris who has sadly walked away from the streaming scene now and we definitely miss her. But she'll move on to bigger and better things I'm sure. Chris was the one who is the reason I started talking in stream chats, to join in with her own lovely community.
Tashnarr - is a relatively new streamer for me. I never really watched while she was doing the creative streams, although those were still excellent streams. There were just other people on ! Tash is another lovely person, with a cheeky, chirpy, giggly, definitely no nonsense attitude and a pleasure to listen to.

And then there's Maggie Krohn and Random Tuesday. Plus Community Leader Susie who has been wonderful to follow on the Twitters. Oh ! Pip Warr too, previously of Rock Paper Shotgun and they lost their best, most interesting person when she disappeared from there. It was great keeping up with the adventures of Humhum, simple and excellent drawings, great character, lovely humour.

The various streams have been great to listen and lurk in. Definitely beats any telly you can think of.

Dwagon commander salutes you all.

I just had a look back through those Elitecember pictures too - varied quality but there's a few in there that I really like and I owe a lot to Steph (@sourfruitjunkie) and Aria (@genkisoda) of the Inklings for encouraging me to try drawing more by showing techniques and above all, showing Fun in drawing.

To the wider world ? Let's see :

Sarah Taylor is an inspiration in the world of cricket. Her wicket keeping (retired now) was a joy to watch. There comes along a player in every generation who is special, who does their thing in sport just so much better than everyone else. And then there are the once in a lifetime people who take it to a whole new level. I don't think I'll ever see a better wicket keeper than Sarah Taylor. She's battled the mental demons too, (the short with Katherine Brunt is pretty special there too) which is tough for anyone. She's quieter off the field but when she does post, there's someone wonderful there.

Of the twitter people I follow, Marina Sirtis is another very special one. From Star Trek TNG, to Stargate, to numerous other parts over the years, she's always bringing that presence to the screen. And she's fun (and different) to follow on Twitter.

You can't mention Stargate without talking about Amanda Tapping who is quieter on Twitter but still fun to follow. I suspect the quiet is due to busy. She's been involved with a number of fun, interesting shows, with Sanctuary being another highlight. She always seems like she has a lot of fun doing what she does. Always try to have fun with whatever you do.

Susie Goodall and Dee Caffari from the yachting world have also been inspirational. It's been great following their progress in both the Vendee Globe and Volvo Round the World race.

Yes. It felt like it was time for a gratuitous picture of a boat. It had almost gone round the world at that point, with just one more leg to go to the finish.

I think that's my brain emptied for now. These are but a selection of wonderful people. There are many more. Including those who I'll think "I should have added them too !", probably 5 minutes after posting !

See you next time. I may have pictures of black holes.

Not All Pop Ups On Websites Are Bad

Are they ?

Yep. Pop ups are annoying but ... bear with me on this one.

But first ... birthday stuff ! I have new books. Especially looking forward to reading Ignition! (An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants) and I also have Ready Player One and Armada from Ernest Cline. Cheers CK !

Can you tell what it is yet ? As always with these, click for bigger and I really must put my seat cover through the washing machine soon.

A small beginning.

It grows ...

4D can barely see over the top of it. Oh and ... reflections ... don't look in the reflections :-D.

A couple of bags later. And even more reflections.

What is this ? Something that opens ? Also lurking dragon inside.

Shiny ....

Is it a house ? Looks dragon sized.

Or maybe just Pizza Delivery DwagonBoy sized.

Job done. 4D looks suitably impressed.

Looks cosy in there.

A view from above. A curious one with this piece is that it's kinda double sided. On the other side of the chimney, a fireplace.

And fully opened up. 4D helping out like the trooper he is. It's missing something though ...

Dwagons ! There are also mini figures in there too. There's a Little Red Riding Hood, a Granny and a Werewolf. With big teeth.

A very tidy build and as is normal for Creator and Ideas kits, it ends up in a very polished, finished result. The simple mechanism for the pop up works extremely smoothly as well.

Enjoyed this one :-).

Melting Meltdown

Gosh, it's hot this week. As in really hot.

Yep. Hot. I think I picked the perfect week to take some annual leave, although maybe not the right week to build a new computer ... It's been a bit toasty for doing more than loafing about drinking lots of water.

But still, new bits arrived on Tuesday after a little bit of Cardiff wandering on Monday. Let's actually talk about Cardiff first. I like Cardiff, there's lots to look at including a few curious book caves. The following appeared and escaped with me :
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
CJ Cherryh - Chanor's Venture
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Larry Niven - Tales of Known Space
David Brin - Existence

A few in there that I know should be really good, a few which are speculative. I still need to finish 2312 ... and you know that more will appear during a Book Barn raid in a few weeks.

I also went a little mad acquiring albums with albums from Aurora, Mike Oldfield (x2), Tori Amos, Vangelis, Jade Bird and Lorde appearing. Also sherbets and bonbons. Cardiff is a good place.

Computer ? Here we go. This'll include an honest critique on some of the bits that appeared, because I will immediately replace one and may well replace another as well.

That's the box, a Bitfenix Nova case and is the candidate to maybe be replaced. A box swap is a big job though so inertia may help it survive. Why don't I like it ? It only extracted a light blood sacrifice (a cut about 3mm long, nothing) but it's just too small and doesn't off enough space for fans or for air to escape. We'll come back to that later.

There was also a small distortion in the corner where the power supply fits in, which must have been the result of a fairly major dinting in the factory and should have made it a quality control reject.

That's the inside of a very empty box ... It's just about big enough. The mainboard goes in the top and there's a fan there to extract hot air. The power supply goes in bottom left ....

There we go. Corsair make good power supplies.

(Disclosure note - there is no sponsorship of any kind here !)

That's the motherboard, which everything fits into. It's an Asrock board, following the Asrock board that did pretty well for me in my last machine.

The ports are at the top left, the little square at the top is where the processor goes and the 4x sockets to the top right is where the memory goes. The longer slot in the middle is where a graphics card will go. Everything else plugs in around the edge, including disc drives and the lights on the case.

That's the processor installed under the stock AMD cooler and the 2x sticks of memory are there too. The label saying "Crucial" in the lower right is a 500GB (actually 470GB) M2 SSD hard disc and then there's the back plate laying loose on top of it all.

You get 2x sticks of memory instead of one (cheaper) big one because the machines are capable are using double the bandwidth of just one stick, which makes them faster.

And that's the gubbins in the box. And actually the last proper picture in this series too. The hard discs go over to the right and graphics in the middle. One of the tricks is to manage those power supply cables such that they don't block the airflow and I couldn't really tuck them somewhere out of the way in this box.

This all actually took a hell of a lot more time than the builds usually do ! It was incredibly hot on Tuesday. Literal sweat dripping and other nonsense like that. It should get a bit cooler from tomorrow.

The next thing to do is to connect the leads and switch the power on and ....

Uhoh. No screen. My keyboard is a little awkward so after plugging in its other USB plug (it has two), I reboot and find "Windows did not start up correctly" followed by the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death.

Oh crikey no, that's really bad news.

Zombie PC. Actually not that bad though because the machine was attempting to boot off the most ancient hard disc which was from 2x machines ago, instead of the Windows 10 older SSD. It fired up nicely after switching the boot order around to the correct hard disc.

What was worrying though was the temperature. I'm pretty certain that I have the cooler installed correctly but ....

That's the readout from a hardware monitoring desktop gadget from Addgadgets that I find really useful, getting its data from Core Temp. A steady 53 degrees C on idle is far too hot for comfort, even in these temperatures. You'll see the graphics card below hovering at 35 degrees C. It's not in any danger of melting down, the machine has survived a quick SETI (Milkyway at Home) stress test topping out at 83 degrees C but that sawtooth pattern to the temperature is worrying. It really shouldn't be doing that and I think the machine was derating itself as well during that stress test. What it all means is that you won't get the full performance out of the machine, it's liable to crash when worked hard and you're unlikely to get the 8 years of life out of it that I got with the last build.

(This is why that hardware monitoring gadget is really handy - it lets you spot and diagnose issues like this, including if the horror of horrors happen - a failed fan).

The temperature is hovering between 53 and 66 degrees C at the moment but it was on a nice and steady (as in, a line and not a sawtooth) 73 while playing Motorsport Manager earlier.

So I'll be heading to the shops tomorrow when it's cooler to acquire a new ... cooler. I also need to get a new Windows licence because I've changed too many bits now. I'll still be able to use the other Windows licence in the old machine.

I haven't transferred over the bluray drive yet. I think that might be a dead'un although I need to verify that by finding an opportune evening to watch Rogue One.

How does it perform ? I used the 3d Mark benchmarks on the old machine before switching and on the more stressing Time Spy demo, the numbers went from 3500 wibbles to 4100 wibbles. I think that's graphics card limited. On the cpu test, the numbers went up from 2200 wibblies to a much shinier 7000 wibblies. The new machine has 6 cores up from 4 and can handle 12 threads, up from 4. it's also a little quicker in the GHz.

So - happy with the upgrade, although the heat and the dodgy cooler mean that I haven't gone into heavier gaming yet. I'll definitely replace the cooler and I'll think about replacing the box. The diminutive size of the box means I'm limited on those cooling options and I'm unconvinced that it will get sufficient airflow.

The name ?

If the old one was called Pumpkin after being built at Halloween, this one had to be Meltdown :-D.

Addendum time .... I've figured out the heat issue ... Check out this updated pic from this morning :

That's much more steady, including a steady idle where I turned the Milkyway At Home calcs off to see how quickly the temperature changes would happen. This is much better.

Fix - in the picture in the middle of the post, the Clock is 4199MHz where the mainboard had auto overclocking enabled and turned the wick up on the processor. When the overclocking is disabled and the processor is back to stock 3600MHz performance, the temperatures are just fine. The idle went up to a little bit high 45 degrees C but I'm ok with that considering ambient temperatures.

This is a bit silly and a black mark against Asrock ... The auto overclocking shouldn't be enabled by default, it makes things hot and shortens the life of the machine.

Resting, Internet Spaceships, Fancy Pooters, Annoyances

Hello everyone.

Week off for me this week. I'll go on so long and then need to get away from Stuff for a little while. That'll be people, work, having to get up in the morning, various stuff like that.

Oh and it's also a chance to listen to a lot of music, get stuff in that I wanted to have delivered, lots of general chill out. Maybe a few trips out and about, may that be in the virtual world or in the real world.

I haven't actually listened to all of the music on the laptop yet and that's approaching a year. I haven't bought much music over the last year, only about 500 tracks. There are 1850 tracks to go to listen to everything and I'm at tracks in the S albums. After listening to tracks individually, I'll queue up the albums and I'm in the O albums there. It's a reasonably systematic way of jumbling up what gets listened to. The next album up in the queue is Once I Was An Eagle by Laura Marling.

One reason for these occasional weeks off is to rest, recover and let some of the painful bits fix themselves up a bit. I'm having to be careful with certain games at the moment, because my wrist is threatening to go very painful ... First person games where you have to do fine aiming with the mouse seem to be the worst and I haven't played many of those for quite some time. WoW was bad for it too because that fine aiming would see me looking to press certain buttons on screen.

Oh - tracks from one album have been coming through at the moment, that's Scarlet and Other Stories by All About Eve and there are some great tracks in it, like Only One Reason.

Internet Spaceships may dominate, if that's Elite, Stellaris or something different when the PC upgrade arrives .....

That's the latest from EDSM star map and I'm now through the centre of the galaxy and heading way off to the left towards the farthest points you can navigate to from Earth. That got named as Beagle Point in game and is the next destination. I can now plot a route to it as well, with the route plotter being limited to just 20,000 light years. That was a great upgrade from the somewhat unreliable 1,000 light year limit it had when I first started playing.

I got me a new paint job ... A few Dragon Green stripes in there.

And that's Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy from at least a light minute out. (Earth is just over 8 light minutes away from our Sun and Mercury is 3.5 light minutes out). The ring inside the black hole is actually light deflected from the Milky Way ribbon to the top right.

Astronomy is fascinating. And scary when it comes to super massive black holes that just happen to be the engine that makes our galaxy happen.

I'll hopefully get back to collecting some great screenshots soon (although there are more that haven't been posted yet). But I would like to go back to some of the games that I set on one side for a bit. Like Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Prey which were going beyond the capabilities of my computer as it was at the time.

New bits are on their way ... What'll be in the box ?
AMD Ryzen 5 3600. Latest modest processor from these guys and it's apparently better than Intel if you feed it with good memory.
X570 motherboard. Gotta have something to link it all together.
500GB M2 drive from Crucial. This'll be my 4th SSD from Crucial and they've done well so far. This upgrade was a bit too tempting.
32GB of DDR4-3200. This will be another 4x upgrade from the 8GB I have here. More memory always helps because the unused memory gets used to help the disc caching out.
New box ... and power supply. Because it's awkward to take a motherboard out when it's in.

I'll be transferring over a 1060 graphics card and my various hard discs. Oh and a bluray drive that may need to be replaced because I think it finally failed. I had to abandon watching Rogue One tonight because it was breaking up too much and I think it's actually been failing for a long time now because it was corrupting the imports of audio cds.

Oh and I'm happy with monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers so those will transfer over too.

One thing that's annoyed me though is the attitude of my credit card company ... I ended up using my debit card to buy the bits too because they (Barclaycard - beware of them) flagged the transaction as potential fraud despite the order being placed at the same IP address as I use to do all the paying off of that card.

They did the same thing last year with the laptop.

Highly annoying. Oh and they did an automatic phone call thing at 10.00 this morning to clear the issue. 10.00 on a Sunday ? WHAT IS THIS HERESY.

Back to reality and better things.

I don't think the bits will arrive tomorrow because I ordered after they all went home on Saturday. May well find myself over in Cardiff again for munchies. And a wander. A wander that may well take me past :

Lego Shop
Music Shop
Sweet Shop
Market Book Stall
Cardiff Castle
(And I need to do a general shopping too)

Hopefully my back feels better this morning to allow me to do that. It was very stiff this morning. Perhaps because I left the window open last night on a cooler night than it has been. Oh and that 10.00am crawl and flop down the stairs for that call from the credit card people.

We shall see !

On the upgrade trail again

I'm seriously considering doing a PC upgrade again ...

Trying to remember the last time I was seriously checking out doing an upgrade. Probably when AMD brought out their Ryzen 2 processor and then the time before would have been the Ryzen 1. It's a good chip and is apparently a lot better than the competition from Intel, depending on who you talk to.

(Obligatory disclosure note - I don't get any sponsorship of any kind. Also, if anyone recognises a picture, all but 1 of these are all from the Google and I would be overjoyed to add a credit if you ask).

Oh ! Anyone recognise the picture from the thumbnail ? We actually had one of those. Ended up having to hack a lot of the games too so that they'd work with the disc interface. Memory limits meant that programs would cheat .... and overwrite memory vital to the Operating System, ok if you didn't need the floppy discs any more. Oh yes. This was a machine from the days of 5.25 inch actual floppy discs ...

But I digress again. As per usual :-D. No internet spaceships again. Maybe.

Couldn't resist. That's part of the thing about upgrading actually. For Elite, I don't actually have to upgrade at the moment. There is the very occasional judder but the machine I have at the moment (i5-2500k and nVidia 1060 graphics) is just fine with Elite at maximum graphics and 1440p. So no upgrade needed for that one. Maybe later when they bring in more features to the game. There will be more Elite screenshots in a later post, I caught a few shiny examples over the weekend in another expedition.

Games like Battletech and quite likely Prey and Deus Ex Mankind Divided (still need to play both of those) are a different story though. Battletech definitely munches through the 8GB in this machine and the Roguetech expansion was unplayable. Prey and DXMD will put greater pressure on the processor. So I'm much more open to an upgrade now.

The usual thing applies though ... only spend what you want to spend. There is literally no upper limit to the daft money you can spend on a computer ... but there's usually no reason to go above a certain point. My machines are powerful but on the modest side. A graphics card that costs £800 will not give you 4x the fun of a £200 graphics card. I'm not convinced that a processor costing £800 is 4 times as good as one costing £200. There's a certain pragmatism that has to come in to choosing the bits.

Saving money that can go to other better places means you can buy more toys than you could before. That £1173 between the £1476 nVidia 2080Ti card (yes you could buy a graphics card for more than what my first 2 cars cost) and a £303 RTX2060 card could go on a Lego UCS Millennium Falcon, a Lego Death Star with a significant amount of change.

Priorities.

Quite.

Ok, so what's this modesty PC ? First up, it's not going to be a whole PC.

It was a lovely relief when changing over laptops last time that my cookies and other internet stuff was just There. I didn't have to set up all the passwords again. Maybe a bit scary that though when you think about it.

What I'll be doing this time is keeping certain parts out of the old machine, like the screen, keyboard, mouse ...

... hard discs and bluray drive and the rest will be upgraded. New box, motherboard, memory, power supply and processor. Oh and actually maybe definitely a new SSD because ...

Quicker, much quicker. Oh and bigger too, so I could put the games that want the performance on the bigger disc. Last year, the 256GB M2 SSD that went in my laptop cost me a discounted £55 if I remember right. This year, you can have a 500GB SSD for £67 or a 1TB for £100. Neat. Pumpkin (current desktop) has a 256GB SSD, an ancient 256GB conventional drive but all the games (except Battletech which was more demanding) go on a 1.5TB conventional drive.

SSD - Solid State Device drive that's essentially memory like you card in your camera. Ultra fast to find your stuff but not as high capacity.
Conventional drive - uses spinning platters with chemicals that store data magnetically. Takes much more time to get the platter to the bit of the disc that has your data. Takes ages if your data is all over the disc.

I better get to the details before I run out of pictures !

Processor - 3rd gen Ryzen 5 3600 costing £190. This goes at 3.6GHz and I don't think the 3.8GHz of the 3600X is worth the extra £50. This comes in a Socket AM4 which needs a suitable motherboard.
Motherboard - there's either the newest shiny of the X570 chipset and MSI offer one that has my eye for £180. Or an older one with by MSI with the less capable B450 chipset for £89. I think the better one is probably worth it here because the advantage is in the bandwidth in the PCI bus.

(Translation - the bits can talk to each other faster and it'd mean shinier graphics that go more smoothly)

Either way, both of them demand DDR4 memory. Don't worry about what DDR4 means (Double Data Rate mk4 = faster than DDR, DDR2, DDR3, SDR and the other types that went before that I can't remember). Things to look for are "System Memory Specification" and the Ryzen 5 3600 is looking for 3.2GHz. It would work with slower memory but it's better to match the speeds. Options ?
DDR4-19200/2400MHz - slower, would work, 2 sticks making up 32GB from Kingston would be £145.
DDR4-25600/3200MHz - synchronised, 2 sticks for 32GB from Kingston again would be £188.

I think it'll be the faster memory because apparently (Rockpapershotgun article) the Ryzens might like the faster memory.

I'd usually go for a cooler as well. I'm only likely to ever go air cooling, as having water around PCs when you don't need to do that is a recipe for disaster. The Sandy Bridge machine I have now has been very stable on air cooling that probably has the Dust Bunny population of Bristol in it by now.

Wasn't taken from inside my PC ... honest.

Power supply ! Last but one piece. Corsair supplies have done me well over the years, so it's over to them again for a 750W. A 650W would be more than enough for what I'll put inside it but I'm looking to do a little future proofing. It's well worth spending extra on a named brand like Corsair because power supplies do blow ... and they can take out the other components with them when they do pop. I've had this happen before. Anyway, 750W for £75.

Case is a curious one. I had the eyes opened to one requirement I would have forgotten about. I do occasionally like to watch a dvd or bluray on my desktop and I'd miss that if I couldn't. My computer chair is sadly a little more comfortable than my sofa. So the requirement is to be able to fit a 5.25" sized bluray drive. Drives seem to be missing those out now ...

Anyway - case ... the AVP X6 caught my eye (link to Novatech) because it has 5.25" bays and a couple of internal fans. Something else to look out for is the graphics card depth ... there are some chunky cards out there. I need to do research there. Price - £35.

I think that's it ... total cost is £668 but bear in mind that's missing the price of :
Graphics - budget for me is c.£200.
Windows - £100 for Windows 10 64bit Home.
Keyboard - £30 will be fine. Unless you find a £150 keyboard for £30 :-D.
Mouse - £30, this is very your own preference again.
(I go for wired for both keyboard and mouse, wireless has drawbacks that I don't think balance the benefit)
Screen - mine is from AOC and I love it. 24" 1080p screen from them would be £140.
Storage - I'll probably acquire a 500GB SSD for £67. And there are 2TB conventional drives for £54.

I think that's it.

If anyone local wants a PC built by the way, supply the bits (I'd consult) and I'd ...

Substitute battlestation for computer.