The Red Hurricane

It's time for a new gaming PC for me.

I built my gaming PC, I affectionately called the Red Storm, back in 2020. It runs Windows 10 and I’ve had a lot of fun with it over the years. Now Microsoft plans to abandon support for Windows 10 in October of 2025. Rather than upgrade my gaming PC to Windows 11, I've decided to simply unplug it from the Internet and continue gaming on it offline from now on.

After all, the danger to Windows 10 no longer having updates for security vulnerabilities comes 99% from the Internet. My previous gaming PC that runs Windows 7, you may have heard me refer to as, "The Brick of Doom", still runs happily offline to this day and remains valuable to me because it runs an old version of Microsoft Office that does not require a constant Internet connection.

Microsoft's antics with Windows 10, which they initially claimed would be the last version of Windows, but of course is not as they try to drive customers to migrate to Windows 11, have really annoyed me. Windows 11 offers no new features of any interest to me and just appears to be TPM/spyware hell, as well as an excuse to sell computers to people that already have perfectly good computers. Additionally, the constant badgering to use OneDrive, or trying to force everyone to use a Microsoft account to just be able login locally to their computers did not help my disposition towards the Windows ecosystem in general.

This is why my new gaming PC will run Linux instead of Windows. I think we're finally at a point where enough games run on Linux that I can justify having a dedicated Linux gaming PC. My new gaming PC will run Bazzite and will leverage a Radeon GPU instead of an Nvidia one. Up till now, I've always used Nvidia GPUs for my gaming PCs, but again because I'm tired of nonsense...this time from Nvidia such as overpricing their GPUs, deprecating support for 32-bit PhysX on their new RTX 50-series GPUs, or what looks to me like the pyromaniac's dream come true, the 12VHPWR connector, nothing Nvidia is offering looks appealing to me right now. This is why I chose a GPU for my new gaming PC that still has 8 pin power connectors and is much more reasonably priced, the Radeon 7900 XT.

For my Steam titles and MMORPGs I still play, my new gaming PC running Bazzite will be called the Red Hurricane. These are the specifications for the Red Hurricane, along with links to the components in case anyone wants to get one for themselves:

The Red Hurricane

• AMD Ryzen™ 9 9950X 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor
• Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARGB CPU Air Cooler, 6 Heat Pipes Cpu cooler, Dual TL-C12C-S PWM Fan, Aluminium Heatsink Cover, AGHP Technology, for AMD AM4/AM5/Intel LGA1700/115X/1155/1200/1851
• GIGABYTE B850I AORUS PRO AMD AM5 LGA 1718 Motherboard, Mini-ITX, DDR5, 2X M.2, PCIe 5.0, USB-C, WIFI7, 2.5GbE LAN, EZ-Latch
• Crucial P3 Plus 2TB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT2000P3PSSD8
• Thermaltake Tower 200 Mini-ITX Computer Case; 2x140mm Pre-Installed CT140 Fans; Supports GPU Length Up to 380mm; CA-1X9-00S4WN-00; Bumblebee; 3 Year Warranty
• Sapphire 11323-02-20G Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Gaming Graphics Card with 20GB GDDR6, AMD RDNA 3
• Crucial BX500 4TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD, up to 540MB/s - CT4000BX500SSD1, Solid State Drive
• Toshiba 20TB MG10ACA20TE SATA 600GB 20in1 HDD

The 2tb drive is for the operating system, the 4tb is for the games to be installed on, and the 20tb drive is for game video recordings. I look forward to putting this new PC together and making new gaming videos with it to share with you.

Time for a reboot

Hi guys,

Time for a reboot. I'm rebooting my gaming channel on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@jsfpcgc) and I've decided that most, if not all, of me gaming videos will now have a blog post associated with them. This way I can offer more information for anyone that wants it.

I'm looking forward to having fun making content again that I hope you enjoy.

Joe Fantabulous

This blog is not dead, at least not quite yet.

I was streaming yesterday when a viewer observed that my blog hadn’t been updated in 4 years. So much has happened and I have been busy with so many things that I just haven’t gotten around to blogging. Time to get this blog restarted! My friends often chat with me about entertainment, technology and gaming-related topics and I think I’ll start posting about some of that. It might be a bit slow at first, but I have a few ideas of things that might be fun to share such as a series on the gaming PC I plan to build, or thoughts on computer hardware, some scripting ideas, educational resources and so on. Although my blog is a bit of an outlet for me I would like it to be a helping hand for you. Maybe I can share something here that you will find useful. I’ll also share a few opinions from time to time.

Thanks for stopping by.

The Little Computer That Could...

AMD is having a tough time, but that means it’s a great time to buy AMD. While it is generally true that Intel processors typically offer the best performance in any bracket it is always true that AMD is the cheapest in any bracket. I use both Intel and AMD processors and they both work just fine.

I’m about to build a new system based around the A6-5400k. The A6 series directly competes with Intel’s i3 processors. This should make a great little system for testing budget gaming options and demonstrating just how cheaply you can enter the PC Gaming scene if you’re a purely console player.

This is a comparison between the A6 I chose versus an i3 that is nearly triple the price (but not triple the performance)

Hi, been busy!

Hi guys. I've been a bit busy with a few things so I haven't had a chance to blog. I had a friend once that said my ambitions exceed my abilities...and that never sit well with me so I've always striven to do and be more. The problem usually ends up being though that there are only so many hours in the day and, whether I like it or not, even I need sleep occasionally. But I've been able to make a little more time to blog so it's time to try and catchup a bit.

I have a bunch of new videos that I'm uploading, it will just take a little time to tag and properly describe them, put them into play-lists...and hopefully get them in the right order. So look for them soon and enjoy.

2000 Subscribers

When I started my YouTube gaming channel I assumed only my friends would watch it. Apparently though I was wrong and today over two thousand fellow gamers subscribe to my channel. My channel is still pretty random, just me and my friends having fun. But the best part is that through the channel I've made new friends, and I'm always happy to have more friends to game with. I hope to hear from viewers about what they like, don't like and any suggestions they have for the channel. I hope people keep enjoying the channel.

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are great because they can store lots of data and have no moving parts. As a result you end up with a device that can retrieve information very quickly because it doesn't have to spin up and look for it the way hard disk drives do. The only limitation is that SSDs have a finite number of writes they can perform before their flash can't be written to any longer so the applications they are best for are ones that read loads of data but write very little. This is EXACTLY what most online games do being that they load data for various game areas, save their data to the cloud, and only write and save locally generally when there is a client software update (patches, oh the non-stop patches).

Watched my channel and noticed everything seems to load really fast? You've been watching SSDs in action! SSDs can make your old computer feel like new if you set the up the right way...

You can read more about it in PCWorld's article:

How to stretch the life of your SSD storage