I have an long standing habit of maxing out the memory on any new box that I buy.

I have found that this gives me a maximum time span before that old devil OBSOLESCENCE comes calling on me.

The cute little box swings a modern 8 core 16 thread AMD Ryzen 7 processor and it takes a lot of memory to max out the slots.

I bought 64 gigs of DDR4 Crucial systems memory.  The little box came with a 1terabyte PCIe 3.0 stick type boot drive and I then added a 2 terabyte encased SSD simply to hold my ENTIRE games library.

So, there is really nothing to add to it going forward  ........



.....  so if there are issues with all that stuff it should show up during the "send it back'" allotted time span  .......

OK,

People are now asking the web experts  IF THEY DARE can they indeed replace a full sized PC ( with a moderate gaming card and specs) with the specific Beelink box that I had bought.

Here is the answer, and it is by and large YES -- YOU CAN.

And if you load up the Beelink with memory and fast drives like I did you can indeed exceed the PC box's workability in these comparison tests.

Here is the video for you to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZUlZ-bjXA&t=110s&ab_channel=ElevatedSystems

And also note, you are plugging in a little bitty $650 loaded up to the max AMD machine that does not get all hot and bothered by Intel's inherent overheating issues and big noisy fan issues.

Another tester reports his results on a smaller unit  ........   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyopwsgUd88&ab_channel=RandomGaminginHD

Games .....  Games ......

There are a mort of them available to put on your local hard drive for free.

Some of these are hacked, or jailbroken games.   Some are old enough that nobody apparently cares any longer, the company went out of business, etc.

Here is a top 10 listing of where to get yer freebee games .....

Fair warning to ye me hearty, ye be a pirate now, me bucko .......



https://awbi.org/top-10-sites-to-download-free-pc-games/



I expect Win 11 to start squealing various alarms like a carnally abused Ms. Piggy very very shortly ......    so before that happens I need me some Mint on a boot-able thumb drive.   The odds of getting infected with a sociable disease just increased astronomically due to the sleazy neighborhoods in which am now cruising .....

As part of my Win 11 set up I had supplied my WiFi ID and password.  

I just now realized I have never run the Cat 5 cable over to the new box --- I seem to be able to run just fine over WiFi and it begs the question of me buying a new cable set.  

I think I will continue to run on WiFi until I free up the old Cat 5 cable that is running to the relatively ancient Dell box.

My Little Box Report


Progress is slow as I keep hitting barriers thrown up by Wintel due to my having used Linux in the past.

I keep having reasons to go back to temporarily use my old machine because I am getting dumped on my over the silly little shite MS and Intel simply won't do.

Wintel is still slower doing some simple upkeep things in my new machine even though it is running on much better hardware.

I keep thinking that I could switch the box over to Linux Mint and recover quicker from that changeover than I could get Win 11 to be fully operational (if it ever got that good compared to Linux Mint Mate, that is).

Having this thought already, it will not take much of a significant new Win 11 mess up to drive me to changing over.

OK, I got my first two games cranked up on Steam and properly downloaded and running like gangbusters.

My little PC is plenty fast enough to play AAA games at full graphics levels ---  with the rub being that my reflexes are quite slow now and my gameplay tends towards stealth mode and using a totally pre-planned sneakiness style.

I die a lot, but learn from the experience and go at it another even sneakier way.  I rely on walk-throughs and cheats to make up for being all old and feeble.

Currently, Syberia - The World Before and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

It takes me a long time ~30+ hours~ to do a Tomb Raider game, the Syberia games are point click puzzle solvers that go a good bit quicker at closer to 15-20 hours.

I have a backlog of games that I bought that wouldn't run right on my previous hardware and I have sources now for lots of hot free games.


---- I learned that all the modern walk-throughs are all very complex web pages now-a-days.  Forget about text based walk-throughs as they do not exist any more.  Walk-throughs include big chunks of the game itself to show you just how to execute the little tricks that are needed to get past the challenge points.

Pull up the walk-through up on your Amazon Fire tablet and lay it aside until you need to refer to the walk-through for the next set of help & directions.   Play the game up on the big screen using the little AMD box until you get tired of being all lost and dead.

Then cheat some for better weapons ---- it really helps old folks like us a lot.


=================================

Warning

Walk throughs have holes in them that the good walk through correct over time.   The bad ones never get updated or corrected, especially as the game itself gets older.

About half of these holes are due to sloppy walk through writing, rather than actual game issues.

Have more that one fairly current walk through and cross compare them for the particular issue you are having.

=================================


My favorite cheat in Serious Sam was applying a cheat mod that made the rotating barrel mini gun shoot the far more powerful buckshot shells instead of FMJ rifle bullets at 1000 rounds a minute.  

I made a trench using that mini gun just shooting a trench down a rock lined street that I couldn't get down without dying from being sniped from the adjacent upper floors and around various corners.

I ducked down in the trench and extended it --- waiting until my ammo and  health had recovered then I popped up and ankle busted all the uglies that had appeared for me to shoot.

Why ankles?  Shotgun pellets bounce and ricochet off pavement very nicely and naturally do a head high expansion cone over 50 yards or so .......

Rinse and repeat until the game quits repopulating new uglies.  Ironically, the upper floor scorpion sniper uglies were relatively easy to kill compared to the Gnars and Skeletons down on the ground.

There was one plaza near the end of the game that had regeneration points (pedestals) where ammo and healing knapsacks would appear every minute.   I'd jump up on the pedestal and just stay there ---- and just change ammo type or guns periodically while waiting for the next ammo regeneration.  Mini gun to pulse laser was a good rotation with always using continuous fire which ate up the ammo and the health at about the perfect mix to come out alive at the end.

There are also other games I started but never finished (got bored and quit on them).

I also liked the No One Live Forever games for putting a scope on a cross bow then allowing the pegging of bad guys to the ground with an arrow through their outside foot.   And this at over 100 plus yards to boot.

The AI in that game would always respond verbally to being wounded ...... the Indian characters were mournfully polite but very mouthy as they slowly bled out while foot pegged to the ground.  

Aieeeee, I am wounded ......  I am hurt, I am bleeding .......   Aieeeee, it hurts so badly.

The ninja assassins were fun too as they could carry around 1-2 ninja stars sticking out of a few non-vital body parts for the rest of that level while periodically protesting very very politely "That hurts".

There was a dart gun in NOLF that had a silencer and a scope available for it that you could find or upgrade to.   Dart ammo were varied and upgrade stackable and included a nasty death gas pellet, some incendiary fire darts and one type of medical healing health dart that left a visible hypodermic needle sticking out where it hit.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/leaked-details-of-amd-ryzen-8000-12-core-ze...

By now you realize that AMD has a reliable and pretty much concrete roadmap going out 2-3 years into the future --- and if they start leaking numbers from the early test runs these results tend to be spot on (or get even slightly better as they go into full production).

Certainly the built-in APU features mentioned seem to pan out very reliably as the testing actually comes from the first mainframe core set sample runs and once these proof out runs  are in place these AMD systemic advancements then get reliably reflected everywhere AMD core sets get used.

Read this web page and understand why Intel is just now dropping out whole future Intel generations of Intel processors so so very very abruptly of late ......

AMD has recently put several iterations of Intel's future design paths into the Overcome by Events category.  Or, sadder yet, Intel is going forward with them anyway knowing they are not competitive.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/leaked-details-of-amd-ryzen-8000-12-core-ze...