My gaming PC is for gaming and OBS only

As a Mac user, buying a gaming PC was a little weird at first. Mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing. In hindsight, I probably should’ve waited a month or so, because then I could have gone with a 4090 directly. But hey, hindsight is 20/20 after all, right? And other than the AV1 encoder options, I don’t think I would get that much more out of the 4090 anyway, as I probably won’t be playing games that are that taxing to begin with.

So what did I actually buy? To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what the majority of this even means.

  • My CPU is an Intel Core i9-12900KF, with 16 cores, 3.20 GHz.
  • My Motherboard is a Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Elite DDR4
  • Then there is my GPU, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with 24Gigs, also from Gigabyte.
  • As for RAM, I have two 16GB DDR4-3200, Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro installed
  • As for storage I have an NVME M.2 1TB Western Digital Black SN770
  • Then PSU, it’s a 1200W be quiet! Straight Power 11, 80Plus Platinum and it’s fully modular, whatever that means.

And the rest is just random stuff I guess? Like the only other slightly interesting thing; I have an Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro MK.2 installed for capturing console stuff, which came in handy for Bayonetta 3 on Switch, as I didn’t have to go find and hook up my HD60S+ again. Not sure how much capturing I’ll be doing on consoles going forward though, as I will only be playing exclusives, or at the very least, timed exclusives on consoles from here on out. As for the setup, the only thing where I am not sure if it’s enough, is the RAM. Time will tell I guess, but I feel like I should have just gone with 64 gigs instead. Either way, I think this setup should keep me going for quite a while.

So far I am happy with the 3090 Ti as well, but we will see for how long that lasts before I feel like I need a 4090 and who knows maybe a ti will be out by then as well. Coming from consoles, I am also not really used to steady frame rates, let alone playing games at 144 frames per second. I am not saying anything mind blowing here to any PC gamer out there, but it is quite blissful, when “YES” is your response to the questions “Do you want visual fidelity, or do you want performance?”, instead of actually having to choose one.



I seriously only bought this gaming PC for, well, gaming and OBS. Meaning playing, streaming and recording. There’s really nothing else going to happen with this machine. Everything productivity related, be it writing which I could technically do on anything as I use Google docs, video editing which I exclusively do in Final Cut and Photoshop, which I could use everywhere as well I think, as I would just need to sign in to CreativeCloud on another machine, right? But, all these things, I will keep doing them on Mac and that’s mainly because I don’t like working on Windows. I have to work on Windows at work, like my actual IRL daytime job and I really dislike working with windows. With the sole exception of Excel, everything just feels like such a drag. That is just a preference though. Whenever I hear complaints about people not liking Macs, I usually get where they are coming from. In the end it is just a preference, a preference that is heavily influenced by what you are used to and how everything else interacts with what you are used to. My phone, earpods and headphones all work together with my computer. Which to me is very important, as it makes my life a lot easier. At the same time, to play any game that isn’t an Apple Arcade game on my Mac, would be a rather frustrating experience, so in that instance Windows is still a million light years ahead of it. And yes the M2, which I don’t have, is supposed to play games going forward, right? Which is cool. However, this PC I put together came in at 4,125 € and as I said already it works beautifully. My MacBook Pro costs quite a bit more than that, but no matter how optimised it is, it won’t be anywhere near satisfying enough, without sounding like an aeroplane trying to take off, with a framerate that is acceptable, whilst at the same time, not looking like absolute garbage.

PS5 collecting dust

While this wasn’t exactly a cheap endeavour to partake in, I think I made the right choice splitting these two tasks. Granted, the task was technically split prior to this as well, as I had always been a console gamer. Yet, my PlayStation 5 has been collecting dust for a couple of months now and truth be told I haven’t really been utilising this PC for gaming much either, it was mainly recording. I bought this machine for games coming out in 2023 and on though, so it’s ok. There is something a lot more exciting about playing games in any which way I like now, including input devices. Emulation is another topic I am quite excited about. That was always something that was very hard to even get started on with a Mac. You always had to make a lot of concessions, even with really cool things like Openemu for example, which does the job, but you really lack control in regards to output, like resolution, filters and the likes. It works, but not great. Then you move over to emulators of more recent platforms, like 3DS and Switch, yeah… I never even got those emulators to work on MacOS, supposedly it’s possible, but it wasn’t happening for me.



So there are quite a few things, where at least in my head, buying this machine actually makes a lot of sense. And I am also quite excited to find out where the limits are. With the 40 series out in the world, the 3090 Ti is obviously not state of the art anymore and thus I am quite curious to see what the limits are going to be, for the types of games I am playing anyway. From my wishlist, I would assume that Forspoken, Lies of P and especially Resident Evil 4 Remake are going to be the games where my GPU is probably not going to be able to run them at maxed out settings. That is something I can definitely make an update on in early Q2 though, I’ll put that in my calendar. What about you, what is your preferred way to play games and to do your productivity stuff these days? See you next time. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *