LooneyJuice

The "B" word should only ever be used according to a point of reference. What's your target resolution/framerate? 1080p 60hz?144hz? 1440p 60hz? If you're playing in the 60 range mostly (and a bit above, depending on the game), you should be fine.

Witcher 3
 
Love the game to absolute bits, but it's not perfect. It's prone to issues with AI pathfinding, collisions, the infamous Roach and very temperamental movement. The latter was caused by a conscious choice to go with animation fluidity (something that was lacking in Witcher 2) rather than absolute control fidelity (found it wasn't an issue in combat surprisingly). CDPR responded with an alternate movement response mode which even though I won't use because the movement is seared into my brain, I'd recommend fresh players start with it enabled. Trust me, it took me a long time to recognize its faults, I'm super biased in favor of this game. There may be more things I'm not aware of. Other than that, words cannot describe how I feel about the game. The story is incredibly nuanced, and the two expansion packs somehow manage to top each previous installment. Blood and Wine took already 10/10 writing and somehow took it to the next level. With Toussaint being a colorful world so far removed from the original war-torn world of Velen, it's legitimately as if you walked into a fairy tale.
 
Also, Faux Norsemen in the Skellige Isles. Gorgeous place, awesome people.
 
EDIT: I'm sorry, I could not help myself, HHHGNNN!
Also, Ansel's pretty good.

 
Wolfenstein New Order
 
One of my favorite story-driven FPS games to date (up there with the Metros etc), let down at the very end by a very dodgy, cumbersome, and in contrast to the rest of the game, stale boss fight. Besides that, an extremely satisfying and varied experience. It took the Wolfenstein name and gave it a way more deep, dark and nuanced tone than it ever deserved.
 
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
 
It was the first ES game I ever spent any reasonable amount of time with (I was too late to appreciate Morrowind as it was already dated and rickety by the time Oblivion was out). I finished it, I enjoyed it, but it suffered from the usual array of Bethesda RPG issues, with the intermittent sparks of brilliance. What redeemed it eventually for me was The Shivering Isles expansion. The story and the world were pretty sublime at the time. Unfortunately somewhat hampered by the awkward combat, unnerving character interactions, the damn Conversation Pie™ and some repetitive scenery and the like.
 
As a taster, the world of The Shivering Isles was divided into two. Mania and Dementia, ruled by a temperamental and capricious God of Madness. 'Nuff said.
 
Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)
 
To this day, extremely varied gameplay for what it is. Functional ground and vehicular combat, mixed with some campaigns and a different take on linear gameplay for Single Player playthroughs. The interface though... Oh the interface was absolutely atrocious. Even in the old days it looked like something a mod would implement over an existing game. Otherwise, the game was a hoot.
 
B-17 Flying Fortress
 
Very faithful representation of a WW2 B-17 bomber crew, with all the drama that entails. Excruciatingly detailed, but unless you were a hardcore Aviation nut, sitting through an 8 hour sortie in real time could tax the best of us.
 
ARMA 3
 
The most versatile combat game of them all. Massive terrains, an essentially infinite number of gear (vanilla and mods), gorgeous Islands, bombastic scale, and the most awe-inspiring battles you'll ever see if you join a big group. Can accommodate an insane amount of people on the same server. Does a good job of spreading the emphasis on different vehicles, rather than everything just being complimentary to infantry. 
 
Horribly, massively, excruciatingly buggy. No joke, there are things ARMA players will put up with, that others would just call broken, leave a negative review on steam and post it on twitter as another example of what Steam will let through these days. For all its massive scale, it still can't quite take advantage of modern hardware properly and will invariably do its own thing performance-wise when it deems appropriate to do so. Got a 7900X and 2 1080tis? Great! Prepare to see anything from 150fps to 28. Better now with 64bit, and active development since its initial release in 2013, but you have to be a very patient human being.
 
Cool little topic BTW, always like engaging in little discussions regarding this particular topic. It's a nice way of killing bias as well and not offering blind recommendations. It's why I, when asked "Is Witcher 3 any good?", I suppress the squealing, take a deep breath and go "I adore it, I'm very biased though, so maybe ask some people or watch a partial walkthrough to get a feel for it". It takes every ounce of mental strength I have.
 

EDIT: Flavor

Short answer. Because they can. 
 
Other than that, if you have no incentive to upgrade, economical or otherwise, you can get away with some pretty old hardware if you have intimate knowledge of your resource usage for the software you use. Then there's stuff like performance envelopes you wish to abide by (1080p/60hz/144hz etc). I have to stress though, that an R9 290 when brand new was a pretty damn good performer. So, for most games, you fell into the bracket of buying good now, and upgrading later. If you had something like an R9 270 or something, I believe you'd be singing a somewhat different tune. Sure, it can do the same things, but the difference is how it does it.
 
There is also the matter of ease of use. Heftier performance generally nets you a more streamlined user experience without the need to tinker with your software or games to even things out. You just crank options up, max any presets, jump in and forget about it.

Yeah, it goes back to intimate knowledge of your applications. I could play plenty of my stuff on my old 7850s. Can I? Yes. Would I now? Hell no 

Not every PSU has to be thrown out after 8 years. Having 10 years of warranty on high end PSUs isn't that uncommon nowadays and I expect that those PSUs will last 10+ years.

Short answer. Because they can. 
 
Other than that, if you have no incentive to upgrade, economical or otherwise, you can get away with some pretty old hardware if you have intimate knowledge of your resource usage for the software you use. Then there's stuff like performance envelopes you wish to abide by (1080p/60hz/144hz etc). I have to stress though, that an R9 290 when brand new was a pretty damn good performer. So, for most games, you fell into the bracket of buying good now, and upgrading later. If you had something like an R9 270 or something, I believe you'd be singing a somewhat different tune. Sure, it can do the same things, but the difference is how it does it.
 
There is also the matter of ease of use. Heftier performance generally nets you a more streamlined user experience without the need to tinker with your software or games to even things out. You just crank options up, max any presets, jump in and forget about it.

Short answer. Because they can. 
 
Other than that, if you have no incentive to upgrade, economical or otherwise, you can get away with some pretty old hardware if you have intimate knowledge of your resource usage for the software you use. Then there's stuff like performance envelopes you wish to abide by (1080p/60hz/144hz etc). I have to stress though, that an R9 290 when brand new was a pretty damn good performer. So, for most games, you fell into the bracket of buying good now, and upgrading later. If you had something like an R9 270 or something, I believe you'd be singing a somewhat different tune. Sure, it can do the same things, but the difference is how it does it.
 
There is also the matter of ease of use. Heftier performance generally nets you a more streamlined user experience without the need to tinker with your software or games to even things out. You just crank options up, max any presets, jump in and forget about it.

I think the hard part will be to find a Z67 or Z77 board for the 2600K. I myself got a 2700K last summer for $130 as a slight upgrade from my 2500K. Well worth it.
 
Though if you're playing Battlefield, I would say go for the 4770K if possible. That game is very CPU intensive.
 
Definitely check out the Gamer's Nexus video.

Here we go again.

Oh not Vulkan again... Poor Doom has turned into another Ashes of the Benchmark for AMD. Even though it is an actual game, and an exceptional one at that. Not to mention, I'm not a fan of Blind Tests at all. IMO, it removes all the objectivity of painstakingly produced numbers from outlets such as GN and boils it down to a few soundbites. 
 
I could probably tailor certain games to run equally well between a 1070 and a 970 with no glaringly noticeable detriment to visuals at 1080p and have people praise one or the other.
 
Also, seriously, if it's still dodgy to base your purchase on DX12 implementation, how prudent is it to base it off Vulkan?

Oh not Vulkan again... Poor Doom has turned into another Ashes of the Benchmark for AMD. Even though it is an actual game, and an exceptional one at that. Not to mention, I'm not a fan of Blind Tests at all. IMO, it removes all the objectivity of painstakingly produced numbers from outlets such as GN and boils it down to a few soundbites. 
 
I could probably tailor certain games to run equally well between a 1070 and a 970 with no glaringly noticeable detriment to visuals at 1080p and have people praise one or the other.
 
Also, seriously, if it's still dodgy to base your purchase on DX12 implementation, how prudent is it to base it off Vulkan?

I'm all in favor of double blind tests, but this is not a blind test, this is marketing.
 
I'd hate to think how big the margin of error is with a sample size of only 10. 
 

Yeah, I spent too much money on an old computer, not gonna lie. I've wanted an AT since I got into old PCs, and now I have a new old stock computer. I am the original owner of a PC that's older than me.
 
 

Two big boxes, one for the system unit and the other for the documentation/keyboard
 

I didn't get a picture of the boxes before I opened them, but they were sealed with the original tape, although after 29 years, I can't say that the word "sealed" is an accurate one.
 

All the documentation is there, and the setup disks for the machine.
 

There's my very blurry shot of my "brand new" IBM Model M keyboard from 1989
 

There she is, never used, protective cardboard insert in floppy drive and everything.
 

There's the guts, they do not build computers like this anymore. It weighs a whopping 43lbs. Even in the 80s, they were painting the insides of the cases black. That MFM hard drive is the size of 2 5.25" disk drives stacked on top of each other and only has a capacity of 30MB. This machine has an 8Mhz 80286 processor and 512KB of RAM. At this point, the computer has no video adapter installed, they didn't come with one. Apparently back when these were new, you'd have to buy one seperately.
 

Back then, it wasn't uncommon to have issues with the motherboard after manufacturing. IBM often fixed the boards by hand, which is what those 3 orange wires are for.
 

After installing an ISA VGA card I've had laying around for a while and running the setup disk to configure the CMOS (this machine does not have the BIOS setup menu in ROM), it boots to IBM BASIC, which is stored in ROM, which is a good sign. The hard drive also roared to life.
 

The introductory disk that came with the machine shows the features of the computer and is peripherals in an entertaining manner, with ascii graphics all over
 

Old MFM hard drives like these do not have a side of any platter dedicated to store location data, so the read write heads will not know where to go to find tracks. These old drives must be low level formatted, which is where the computer writes that track location data. Also these drives do not use voice coils to move the heads, instead they use stepper motors to move them, which generates some interesting noises while being used.
 

After all that setup work, I installed MS-DOS 3.30 to the HDD. I also installed a network card so that I can FTP old games to this machine from my modern PC. I also installed a slowdown utility called AT-SLOW to the machine, because believe it or not, this computer is not slow enough for a few programs I intend to run. Back when the original IBM PC/XT machines were the thing to have, the computers did not have a real time clock, so all software timing was based off the CPU clock. This causes programs to run waaaaay too fast if run on anything faster than a 4.77Mhz 8088/86 CPU. 
 

This computer dwarfs my old 486 machine over there.
 

 
Hope you enjoyed your small trip through my 43lb steel time machine.

Would be nice to know what the actual vendor/version it is. GB R9 390 G1? MSI R9 390? Sapphire Nitro?

Pique, not "peak"... Unless you're having an orgasm every time...

I'm talking about the kids who just complain and don't provide any meaningful input other than "I don't like clickbait". 

I believe that Linus said his thumbnails gave up to a 20% increase in views.  If true, that is significant.

It is true, sadly, which is why absolutely everyone and their dog is doing it. I really can't fault them if the content is still up to snuff. Hell, if you have no choice, might as well go apeshit and have some fun with it too while you're at it. The kind of fun Luke had when he was puking a punch of CPUs no one knew how he stashed.

I have to say, for everyone commenting so passionately on this subject, on a supposed hot topic, this thread, in roughly a day has amassed a grand total of 56 posts. Including this one. How many views does an LTT video amass in 20 hours? How many likes/dislikes? How many viewers who may genuinely appreciate the content? Would you invalidate their input according to some sort of criteria? Youtube is progressively making it harder and harder to live off of, even resorting to baked-in ad spamming. Some channels have even noticed a declining trend in visits to old videos. Not to mention all the stuff I and many other people don't know about regarding what's going on under the hood. 
 
And I can't find a reason to believe the video on this kerfuffle wasn't genuine. It was backed by numbers, demographic stats, you name it. Constructive input is always nice, but vehemently expressing an opinion on this subject expecting a few tens of posts to change the course of an entire media entity is a bit, ambitious methinks.

This was what it was like in the 90's though.  you had to spend over $2500 on a machine that would last 2-3 years then the latest titles would start having issues.  When the age came that an $800 PC would last 5-6 years and still play latest titles adequately was a blessing.  Not sure why anyone would want to go back to needing to upgrade every two years.

A smartphone for gamers. It may be overly cynical, but that sounds like toilet paper for crane operators, or spoons for gymnasts. Maybe even socks for ventriloquists or a toothbrush for extraterrestrials.
 
Actually, the latter would be a genuine departure from baseline designs to accommodate a completely new market segment. This phone, however, maybe not so much.

Unless there's a real problem that they can somehow fix, most system tuners/optimizers are purely snake oil. Some PC cleaning tools are rather adept at clearing up space, which the end user may find useful (CCleaner).

Practically all computer optimizers are snake oil. They hide behind scary sounding words and alarms to get people who don't know better to buy their software that does something your system or application can do already. As some measure of proof, I tried making Windows 10 lean from a fresh install. I saved about 600MB of RAM and cut about a third of the processes. The amount of performance I got was anywhere from <1% to maybe 2% on average.
 
The impact of the OS by itself should be very small. If it's not, then 9 times out of 10, something else is making the OS not behave.

I heard that they have a SWG emulator out there with quite a few people still playing. 

@LooneyJuice, other awesome mods are the GCW-1035 mod (I think by Delta), and his TFA mod. They make the stormtrooper skins look amazing, and bring in the guns and such from the new Battlefront. Basically EA's Battlefront (especially once you have HarrisonFog's maps installed -the Death Star is especially good - and Evolved and the graphic mod running), without star cards and it's all offline if you want it to be. 
 
 
EDIT: Also, do you know any good free gameplay capture software? Nvidia has one, right? It'd be cool to upload some vids, just to show people how cool the mods are.