Gamer or Tech Enthusiast?

[Jumper118]

i am an overclocker every time a new benchmark comes out i'm on it like a car bonnet. i'm also a hardware enthusiast cos i like to have lots of hardware to overclock. don't play games at all really. i cba downloading them, my interwebs are too slow and it drops out every 30mins or so.  

[Kamina]

Both, but I focus more on tech these days. 

[Humbug]

Gamer first, tech enthusiast 2nd.

Synthetic benchmarks mean nothing to me. The tech elevates my quality of gaming, although my rig looking pretty and giving me the satisfaction of building and something to tinker with are important too...

[Guest]

Much gamer, very facepalm!

[the ginger gamer]

I do game a lot but i enjoy building/researching pc parts, terms, and information in general more than anything. 

[Fred Castellum]

Don't game much anymore, so tech enthusiast.

[steffen_anywhere]

Both here, more tech side lately though. Just been trying to find myself a new addicting game. I think I found it with Kerball Space Program.

Yeah!!!

Da dah da da da da daaahh dah da.

[PsychoticEpisode]

I was an enthusiast but I found that with out games to play it was pointless. Now I spend my money on games and I have more games than I can play right now(100 on steam alone). I value having  fun playing games more than building my PC. Why spend $1000 or more on a PC and only have 1 or 2 games to play.

[Almercenary]

Im an enthusiast at looking at products I can't buy...

[TetraSky]

Both, but I find myself not playing many games lately... I get bored of them extremely quickly and never end up finishing them.

[angrylemon]

my enthusiasm is limited by my wallet.

oh the feels

[Misanthrope]

I'm definitely a Gamer, of the PC variety: To me it's always about function first. I read on (some) tech just to get an idea of what the future holds but I never preoccupy myself with tech for the sake of tech unless it has a very real and practical usage that I can benefit from i.e. To me the perfect PC is the one that gives you the best possible performance with the least amount of extra features that are not needed/likely to be frequently used

[Tech_Dreamer]

mostly tech enthusiastic tho

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

silent ninja

[TooManyErrors]

Even though I initially wanted to build a PC just to play games, I found that I actually became interested in technology, and will go out of my way to try to find out more about it. I would have higher end PC parts now, but my budget doesn't permit me,

[Nit3Rid3R]

Obviously both. 

[Wauthar]

Whoa, seems like the vast majority is both. Including me

[FlamingMetalHorse]

I was gaming since I was about 5 or 6 years old. I shared a PC with my Mom and sister that my dad built with one of the 1.0ghz AMD processors (I think it was one of the old Athlon processors), an Elitegroup motherboard that actually worked (I hear that ECS Motherboards have a high rate of failure), and a bunch of other specs that I don't know because I don't remember anything and I'm just going off of what my father told me. He did say something about having a Banshee or a Voodoo graphics card. Some of my first games were Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament, Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and Lego Racers 2. I also had a Gameboy color with a plethora of Star Wars games and some Pokemon games (Which were my sister's that she let me borrow. Pokemon Blue was my favorite). I also got a Gameboy Advance. Eventually, my sister and I got a PS2, and  we gamed on both the PS2 and PC pretty casually until I was about 12-14 when I got more hardcore. It was about then when I played Half-Life and Starcraft. We got a Nintendo 64 later down the road, which worked for a while but died on us pretty soon.

 

Around 2009, my dad built me my own PC with the E7500 CPU, a motherboard of some sort (DDR2 memory, LGA775, Micro ATX), a Radeon 4850 or 4870, and a 320gb Maxtor PATA drive. For some reason, the graphics drivers that I had read "ATI Catalyst Control Center" even though AMD bought ATI in 2006 (according to my research). A couple years later, he upgraded it to the Radeon 5770 (Asus EAH5770 with a Zalman VF1000 heatsink) that I have now.

 

Previous to November (Approximation) of 2013, I was purely a gamer, and I didn't know jack shcmitt about technology. I had many misconceptions in my mind that are too embarrassing for me to expose to anyone here *cringes.* So one day I was playing Skyrim and I noticed that I couldn't play it maxed out, and that I had atrocious load times on my ancient PATA hard drive. I just thought "I shall upgrade! I desire the true potential of the glorious realm of the PC! But first I need to learn what a PCIe slot is!" and so I researched day after day, staying up almost all night for months trying to learn about how the computer works, and watching reviews of different graphics cards, CPUs, RAM, Solid state drives, and everything else. My room, which is actually a garage that had been converted into a room many years before, had turned into a computer lab. There's carpet everywhere, but it's hot and humid out in Florida, ESD is pretty rare, and I have my ESD wrist band ready just in case. I had gutted many ancient computers that use DDR memory, old pinned Pentiums, and the big old Athlons that are about 2-2.5 times the size of the pentiums. I also went surfing through a gigantic pile of old parts that my dad left laying around. At that point I had realized that I had become a major enthusiast.

 

I went on many expeditions; Journeys to build PCs. Most of these journeys failed because there were no working RAM kits around (except for one DDR2 kit with only one of the one-gigabyte sticks out of two working.) I had many disasters with thermal compounds.

 

On Christmas of 2013, I got a 1 terabyte Seagate Barracuda and a 120 gigabyte Kingston V300 solid state drive to replace my ancient 320 gigabyte PATA drive, and Windows 7 to replace XP. Talk about one hell of an upgrade. Things acutally loaded fast, and it was glorious. Garry's mod went from a 3-5 minute load time to a 10 second load time (I do mean that literally. The solid state drive obviously wiped the floor with the PATA drive.)

 

Journeys to upgrade my own PC. I had salvaged many things for my computer; an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 to replace my Intel Core 2 Duo E7500, a Thermaltake V1 heatsink to replace some old, crappy heatsink that was on my CPU, and two 120mm fans (I was used to 80mm fans, so these 120mm fans looked big and sexy to me).

 

Quests of overclocking, or OGREclocking as I like to call it. I clocked my Q6600 to 3.06 gigahertz, and it runs perfectly stable.

 

That is how I became an enthusiast. I'm still a gamer, but still an enthusiast. On a general scale, I think I am a bit more interested in the hardware than the software.  My next upgrade is probably going to be a better graphics card (R9 280x looks really good right now), although I could go with a new CPU + Motherboard since the price to performance for upgrades on an LGA775 CPU are terrible (The CPUs themselves aren't bad, but their prices are just inflated.) and I desire a more powerful CPU. That AMD FX-8350 is looking REALLY sexy right now. Even the box it comes in makes me drool. Presently, I embark upon a voyage to receive an A+ certification. I will possibly get into programming, and once I do, I will make a website dedicated to our Ogrelord, Shrek. Shrek is love. Shrek is life.

[midrim]

Previous to November (Approximation) of 2013, I was purely a gamer, and I didn't know jack shcmitt about technology. I had many misconceptions in my mind that are too embarrassing for me to expose to anyone here *cringes.* So one day I was playing Skyrim and I noticed that I couldn't play it maxed out, and that I had atrocious load times on my ancient PATA hard drive. I just thought "I shall upgrade! I desire the true potential of the glorious realm of the PC! But first I need to learn what a PCIe slot is!" and so I researched day after day, staying up almost all night for months trying to learn about how the computer works, and watching reviews of different graphics cards, CPUs, RAM, Solid state drives, and everything else. My room, which is actually a garage that had been converted into a room many years before, had turned into a computer lab. There's carpet everywhere, but it's hot and humid out in Florida, ESD is pretty rare, and I have my ESD wrist band ready just in case. I had gutted many ancient computers that use DDR memory, old pinned Pentiums, and the big old Athlons that are about 2-2.5 times the size of the pentiums. I also went surfing through a gigantic pile of old parts that my dad left laying around. At that point I had realized that I had become a major enthusiast.

 

Wish I had a dad that knew how to build computers lol.

 

Had a similar story. Back in 2012 I hated the fps I was getting on Fallout NV on my old laptop even on low settings. Didn't know anything about computers aside from me adding extra ram to my laptop at that time (back when I still thought ram=performance *shudders*).  Then the naive bastard that I was started looking at prebuilts *shudders more*. Saw my local tech shop was selling cheaper stuff, so I started researching. Finally able to build and play on a new rig but the researches never stopped. EVER. I find myself lurking tech sites more and more than I lurk caves in skyrim. I still game a minimum of an hour a day though.

 

Is it weird that I find heatsinks more appealing to look at these days than Crysis 3 at max settings? THOSE FINS MAN. SO SEXY.

[SkR]

tech enthusiast by far, but i am slowly getting into pc gaming (when i have the time)

[szewei]

Gamer at first, when my computer couldn't run games anymore learned about building one, became an enthusiast after that

[Joshua Ondangan]

I play games but not as much. I don't mind spending money on stuff I won't be using for the sake of collection or personal hand on experience. so I guess I'm on the tech side.

 

also I question buying games unless it's one of the series I'm collecting.

[StareX]

both.

[LAwLz]

Well I hate the label "gamer" because it seems like it's mostly associated with 12 year olds that have no common sense and that sucks at games. I do play games though and I guess that's enough to be a "gamer".

Tech enthusiast sounds kind of pretentious (yes I am aware of the ironic, thank you) but I guess I am that too.

I don't call myself any of those though. I don't really label myself as belonging to any specific group in general.