Having you chair and desk correct will also help, make sure your arms are hanging from your shoulders so they are not resting on the desk. I use 2 Razer mouse mats to soften my desk and picked up a G500 mouse so i can adjust the weight for comfort. Also take a break every hour or so and get a drink and stretch a little as it will all help. A high backed chair with lumbar support will set you back about 35ish
When it comes to bang for buck in PC games the SSD makes a smaller difference compared to dropping that extra 80 pounds plus on to a CPU/ Motherboard upgrade or graphics card. But if you have a nice rig and some spare cash then yes and SSD striped is a lovely touch :D
I tend to upgrade about once every 18 months and ill drop in the region of 600 on parts then slam it back through the business lol My brother on the other hand will spend about 800 plus a year on getting the latest processor GFX or RAM and then proceed to run everything on max and whine when the game isnt stressing his PC lol I used to do a lot of video editing and uploading to youtube when the Machinima boom first took off but that was done on a dual core 4GB RAM and i was recording MW2 on High with Fraps it seems that a lot of the time its all the gear no idea when people splash out on a PC. For a lot of gamers a 600 pound i5 configured correctly will do 90 percent of what they require and they wouldnt be able to tell the difference unless they are running an FPS monitor. When you weigh up the fact that now a days you can buy a PS3 or xbox with a load of extras for 170 and you know that for the next few years you wont need to upgrade its easy to grab one of them and slap yourself kid in front of it and its easy gaming. You cant do that when it comes to a PC you need to tweak upgrade almost every 12 months to get a resasonable experince But I think most PC gamers just love being able to open the side and drop the new kit in which i think is justification in its self.
I thought i'd drop in my experiences so far: Battlelog - its ok a little bit strange when i first opened this up but now im used to it, creating parties getting us all in to one game without any issues is ok so far, only annoyance is not being able to adjust graphics and my load outs pre-game but i can live with that as most fresh games have about 20 seconds before the round starts. Being able to just copy the Origin Game folder between PC's (like steam) is a big help when trying to save on the download time for friends.
I currently run this on 2 PC's, 1 at work and 1 at home. At work im running this on a i3 530 (stock) GTX260 and 6GB of some random cheap DDR3 RAM and a 22" Samsung and its running great on medium settings, no tearing the odd orange flash across the screen but on the whole very visually stunning. Fraps is showing an average of 40fps which is very playable. At home im running a i5 750 (stock), 4GB OCZ 1600, ATI 6870 and a 24" Samsung and with fraps ticking along its averaging around 60fps with all settings on High and Ultra but with Vsync off. Gameplay: On the whole no issues with connecting to servers but ill be honest i mainly stick to the UK killercreation Servers as the pings are usually quite low and the glitches not to many so overall a happy gaming experience from that perspective. Now teamplay is a different matter, at work we tend to sit down for an hour or two at lunch and play online games ranging from EFLC to BFBC2 and Black Ops (we love PC gaming) on the rare occasion we have all been placed in to the same squad which is great but most of the time we are split and if we are lucky clicking on leave and join squad a few times might drop us in to the correct one. The sticky part is the overall teamplay which as the days roll by seems to be picking up which is looking promising for the release date with people understanding that providing suppressive fire to allow your team mates to push forward is going to hurt your accuracy stats but its about the bigger picture. Most games ive been on have been quite equal with the team balancing and rather that a quick 15 minute steam roll its been a hectic palm sweating 30-45 minutes going down to the wire on the last mcom station! Glitches: This is obviously still the beta but on the whole the glitches have been minimal with the occasional dive to the ground resulting in a swim in to nothing and if im lucky a few jumps and im out or a suicide click and then back in the game with a mental note to avoid that sandbag or hole in the ground. I have had on a few occasions the screen flicker orange, dead bodies shooting as the person is not actually dead, but by far the worst one which resulted in me smashing the mouse and a walk out side for a smoke was not being able to aim down the sights and the gun not firing in a critical part of the game! Overall im really enjoying the beta, graphics look stunning, gameplay is slick and the Metro map in my opinion is a good induction to the game as it offers a bit of everything from fairly wide long spaces to tight twisty corridors and making the decision to be the first up the stairs and make a break for that side door quite exciting. Roll on the release date :)
Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a great online multiplayer and pretty cheap as well. It will also get you ready for BF3 which will just be mind blowing! Crysis 2 is a different type of fun online it is the Marmite of the gaming world, I personally enjoyed it but I was mainly playing the classic styles without all the nano suits which was quality fun but the nano suits servers were tough and fast and very intense!
I used Fraps to do all of my recordings if you do go for it make sure the recordings are going to a second physical HDD as it will not impact your in game performance. Settings on Fraps i found half size and 60fps gave a decent level of quality and i could upload HD vids to youtube at around 300MBs. Sony Movie Studio HD Platinum is pretty cheap at around 25 pounds and for what it offers is a complete bargin its extremly easy to drop in audio files or to record a comentary directly on to the video. There are quite a few programs out there and Playclaw also worked well for multicore processors as it allowed you to specifiy specific cores to handle the records. End of the day just play about and see what get on with then stick to it!
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