OverClockers UK Review

About a month ago, my current gaming set-up just stopped doing it for me. My laptop, as loyal and trusty as it was, had begun to really show its age. It became clear when even smaller scale games were starting to take real performance hits on some of the newer titles. The fan was making a horrible noise and it was clear that my favoured gaming machine was just not going to bear the load of my gaming needs for much longer.

So I decided that between my new job that offers me much better financial stability and my hobby of writing blog posts for gaming, I needed a proper gaming machine that could offer me the ability to continue to experience the latest and greatest gaming content. It was finally time for me to buy a real, true gaming PC. 

My experience with really powerful gaming PCs is sparse. About the most I knew was that I needed a real graphics card, not just Intel HD Graphics, to be able to play anything of any real merit. This was from my previous experience in buying laptops and was a lesson that was expensive for me to learn, as I had gone through multiple different machines to find out that PC gaming is not as simple as buying a machine that looks good.

So, I set out on researching what I needed to know. But the world of PC gaming is a rabbit hole; once you start to scratch the surface it’s information overload. There are so many layers to this segment of gaming that it felt like a mountain of information. Suddenly my vocabulary expanded to include bottlenecking, overclocking, multi-threading, motherboards, and much more. It seemed impossible that I would ever conquer this mass of information because what information out there was contradictory and over-loaded.

Go into any PC build forum and you can see that the gulf of knowledge between the serious gamers and the newbies is huge. There are many builds posted that are picked apart because of the tiniest detail such as whether to go for an Intel 7500 or a 7600k, a difference that at first glance appears to be just numbers and letters, but apparently means something significant (it’s to do with the generation of the processor, ‘k’ apparently stands for the latest ‘Kabylake’ processors that have come out).

This was where I hit the point of intimidation; I didn’t have the time or patience to really get into the nitty gritty of building a PC; a process where I buy each modular part for my machine individually and put them together myself. I was worried about the problem of liability; where if I built this machine and some tiny thing went wrong in the compatibility, or if I made a tiny miscalculation, there could be a costly disaster on the scale of the hundreds of pounds, a price that as a value-conscious consumer I was not willing to risk.

So I decided, I was going to pay for someone to custom-build my PC. It would be an easier option, as an expert would be taking on any liability if the build went wrong, and most of the sites I looked at had options to examine the compatibility of each part. This was where Overclockers UK came in.

I will qualify this by saying that I am not sponsored in any way and currently make nothing in terms of advertising revenue, so quite simply, this is just a blog post detailing my experience out of a passion project and nothing more.

Overclockers UK is at first an intimidating site. There are a number of options available and it is confusing to navigate. They offer a huge range of PC gaming parts so the sheer amount of what is available makes it difficult to actually feel like you’re navigating to the ‘right’ custom-build PC option. That said, this tempted me toward the special offers part of the page, which led me to my current build.

I had done plenty of research up until this point, so I knew ball-park figures of parts and performances I was expecting. This was where the interface of OCUK took over and guided me through the parts. Thankfully, the buying process itself is relatively painless; each part you can buy has a nifty red/green button stating its compatibility and how much more/less it will cost if you customise to that part. This made it very easy to tailor the experience to what I want.

In the end, I settled on a gaming PC that suited me well; NVIDIA 1070 graphics with an i7 Intel processor. While I could have gone with a better value option at the i5, which also came over-clocked, I felt that for the price I was paying I could afford to pay a little extra to have the luxury of a bigger number next to my processor. Payment was taken easily and a variety of options makes it easy to come to an arrangement that suits you.

Delivery was the most difficult part of the order. The PC itself would take 7 days to build and another couple of days to deliver. As I live in a remote part of the UK, I thought that I would have to closely monitor the build and shipping times. This was because I was aware that other people that took significant deliveries in my area (not with OCUK) had problems due to issues with the postcode. That being said, the support I was offered was exemplary and I was given satisfactory information about what was happening with my build at any point I requested.

The final delivery was made promptly, actually a day earlier than expected and exactly to the instructions that I had given. Excitedly, I took my PC and connected it up, with the advice and support of my more hands-on fiancée (okay, she actually did the work). Everything worked well, but I soon found that my PC was not performing as I was expecting on certain games.

The next day, I called up the customer support line, and this was the only problem that I had with OCUK as a customer. Unfortunately, I found that the man on the other end on the phone just did not seem friendly or happy to help me. But the advice he gave me was spot-on. It wound up that I had, in my excitement, forgotten to install the appropriate drivers for my graphics card! This quickly fixed any issues I had with the PC, as the drivers allowed me to customize my experiences to the level I needed.

Overall, I would say that OCUK is a good company to order your PC with. While nothing they did totally exceeded expectations, everything was done promptly and professionally, and at no point was there a totally ‘bad’ situation that occurred. I was very satisfied with the order, and especially liked the touch of free Haribo sweets with the order, and on top of that, the geeky part of me found the shipment packaging so interesting in the way they use expanding foam to secure the parts. It’s extremely cool to look at!

So, to anybody out there that is like me and is interested in trying to get their new custom-build PC, and considering Overclockers UK as a company, I would say that they are totally legitimate and do everything they say they’ll do, and offer a good service. While I wouldn’t say they totally blew my mind, they didn’t need to; they just did everything right, and that is the most important thing of all.

Videogames' Sad Cultural Problems

My writing has dwindled as of late because I got a job in a major British supermarket I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to find enough hours in the day to maintain my hobbies and this website, as I have been working a huge amount of overtime. However, if there is one thing that working at a retailer has taught me about videogames, it is that there is still the sad, annoying perception of gaming as a children’s activity.

Working at checkouts, one of the biggest things that shocks me about selling games is parents’ sheer ignorance and lack of willingness to engage with gaming at all. It is seen as something to shut a child up for a while, to placate them, instead of something to be used as a potential teaching tool. This is deeply frustrating; as I have written before, gaming can be a very productive activity if it is used in the right way. If we can teach audiences to engage with games and think academically, critical thinking abilities will continue to go from strength to strength. It’s telling that books and movies both have large bodies of academia devoted to their analysis, and the development of this kind of environment for gaming is an inevitable step that I would rather come sooner than later.

If only parents saw videogames as something more than an expensive, minor annoyance, then we may continue to see the development of videogames as a medium to be taken more seriously. Hopefully as the games we play continue to bridge the generational gap this will happen less and less; something that I tried to do as a worker was encourage the shoppers to engage with their children about the games they enjoy; I would often encourage such parents toward puzzle-solving or creative videogames as a great way to develop a child’s critical thinking skills in a way that also speaks to their generation. As to whether my attempts have been successful is another matter.

Perhaps the worst cultural issue with videogames, however, is the issue of parents ignoring age ratings. PEGI, BBFC and ESRB ratings, among others, exist for a reason, but sadly even today seem to be taken as a joke. Given gaming’s bad reputation and moral panic around videogame violence, such an ignorance to the issues of buying clearly unsuitable games for children is shocking. I’ve seen Call of Duty being bought clearly with the intention as a gift for very young people, and as a gamer and a responsible retail employee I brought this to the parents’ attention, only to be treated with a kind of dismissive scoff. It’s even worse when you consider that the gamings’ cover art in itself shows the kind of violence on offer. It’s more clear than ever what the exact content of a videogame is, and it’s made sad to see the sheer level of ignorance and lack of judgement on parents’ part when it comes to their purchasing choices.

Gaming needs desperately to continue to discourage the purchase of games for unsuitable audiences, for both its reputation as a medium and for the enjoyment of its consumers. We’ve all experienced abuse from younger gamers that make online shooters a fairly toxic place to be in, and suffered the annoyance of squeaky, immature players shouting down our microphones. Gaming is a great hobby, and a wonderful community to be part of, but it’s so sad to see the medium continue to not be taken seriously in the 21st century. It is my hope that soon we will be able to break through these cultural barriers and continue to make videogames among the most welcoming of modern day hobbies.