Tag: BIOS

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When a game is more aggravating than amazing.

How did we get here

It started simple enough. I needed more current titles for benchmarks. Comparisons of hardware need a reference and performance in popular games gives that. New components aren’t always better and sometimes you are better off with what you have. The new part doesn’t improve the experience.

This is usually straight forward. See what is popular, look at reviews, watch for sales. This sometimes leads you astray, however, which is the case with at least one game I’ve recently purchased. I won’t mention the title, but there is a video linked here. This used to be a very popular franchise but a number of moves have ruined that.

The First Issue

The first obstacle you face is the size of files to update or download. Steam told me I needed a whopping 463GB to install this thing. That is larger than many of the SSDs I put in budget builds and the entire drive on mid priced builds. AT that point, I should have known this was a bad idea.

I didn’t have the almost half a terabyte required for this on my portable SSD, so I removed older games I don’t test anymore. I know this will bite me in the butt later as I have older systems I need to test. Still, I carry on because the people need their benchmark. I find room, I load it and proceed to testing.

I’m then met with a series of warning messages. This is not uncommon, A lot of games will give a message about video memory, or a video card driver. This game gave several. The first being that I was using a hard drive instead of an SSD. I literally chose the SSD because it’s portable. Chalking this up to the settings thinking the external SSD may be an internal HDD, I moved on .

I get the customary video driver warning for a driver that was released last week instead of last month, so I ignore it, knowing the driver is current enough, but the warnings didn’t stop. I also got one for a bios update, and the big one after that, Secure Boot.

Secure Boot Issues

Now, I understand that publishers want to keep players from cheating and exploiting the game, but Windows 11 already has some of these requirements and it shouldn’t take a tech expert to play a video game. A game should not make you go into the BIOS of your PC and make changes. It is too easy for someone to make the wrong change, and render the PC useless.

Sucking it up for the team, I make the changes on a couple of my PCs, because it is not a default setting, and carry on. That is until I get to a more budget system with an older AMD video card. What was a mid tier adjustment because a six hour adventure with no end to the ride.

The older AMD card would not allow the PC to post after the change, although, any card with current driver support would. I tried this with an RX480 and RX580 both, with no success. In the case of the RX580, it boot looped and required a BIOS reset. That is not something your average twelve or thirteen year old is going to try to do to play a game.

In the end, this set up won’t be testing that game. I may go back later and play with drivers, but it won’t be today, nor will it be this week. I move on without it and test everything else, which work great, by the way. The system is great, the game sucks.

Additional Feedback

The ironic thing is, that it seems more and more that people don’t even like this game anymore. They play because their friends still do, and many admit the fell out of love with this series a few years ago. I wonder why. Insert sarcasm here, I know perfectly well, why. The game, and indeed the series is more trouble than it’s worth and when you stray so far from a great experience, you end up like Kmart, or Blockbuster, or any number of fond memories from our past.

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Yet another simple, missed opportunity for a good PC

How did we get here?

That part is relatively easy to explain. I have an HP prebuilt PC that I bought a few years ago to review on the YouTube channel. You can find the first video here. I found several ‘flaws’ with it that with a little help could have gone from a PC for basic web browsing and email, to a productive machine. Proprietary parts also made it difficult to upgrade with new ones.

Solutions did come with other companies making products that would also work in that PC, but HP’s choice to try to lock you into their eco structure limited those, and still does. Still, aftermarket power supplies and new types of video cards, added to the range of available upgrades. These could take this basic machine into something that would last longer than HP intended or may have wanted. I get it, make a computer that’s obsolete in a few years and someone has to buy a new one. Make parts hard to find, or have you as the only source and you make even more money. Eventually, though, consumers stop trusting you.

I struggled with a few of these, but managed to find a power supply for a similar machine, I upgraded the memory, and I added a small cooling fan so this prebuilt became a better version of itself. It could still fulfill it’s intended purpose, but now it was able to game and stream because video cards with reasonable power requirements could be added. The computer had a Ryzen processor with AMD graphics, so adding an RX 6400 became possible. That card is not particularly good, but it works. It is also much better than the onboard graphic.

Other Goodies in the HP PC

As it turned out, Nvidia video cards were also supported. By supported, I mean the BIOS for the motherboard recognized the card, and I could put things like a GTX 1660, or even an RTX 3050 6GB model, which could both drastically improve this simple PC into a small beast. I’ll have some feedback and right about the RTX before long, so please check back. For now I’ll simply point back to the blog page, here, but hopefully I remember to come back and update to the RTX 3050 blog when I write it.

By adding a small Noctua fan, the PC managed to stay cooler and the existing processor was more than capable. This prebuilt had all of the tools it needed to be a solid build. It had solid CPU performance, decent graphics performance and plenty of memory. But what if we could do more? The Intel Arc cards have an AVI video encoder. A very good video encoder. Surely we could make a solid editing machine.

The Rub

As it turns out, this PC doesn’t recognize the ARC GPU using the very same slot AMD and NVidia graphics cards use. In fact, the machine doesn’t even post or properly start up. Why is this an issue? Because other HPs from the same era, recognize Intel graphics. They may not have recognized Intel Discrete graphics on a stand alone card, but the CPU has it built in.

Why do I say it’s a simple problem to solve, maybe the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) isn’t set up to be able to do that. The only issue with that statement is that they have current BIOS available for other PCs that already have that option. The BIOS on many of their prebuilts is extremely limited, but they already have the very same feature available in other PCs, and the motherboard used in this prebuilt is very common. The worst part, there have been BIOS updates AFTER Intel video cards have been released. It shouldn’t be very hard. What good were the last several updates? It’s a straight miss for HP.

So, What do we do with the Prebuilt PC?

That part is easy. It’s a solid machine and eventually, it will again become someone’s every day driver. But, it does make for a great test PC and a fine experiment. My early experiences with this model were frustrating, but this thing now is almost like the family pet. Well, if I had a family living with me, or a pet. Still, this PC is solid and much more than I thought I was getting when I first reviewed it. I don’t think HP can take the credit for that , though. And I’m certainly not giving it any.