Road to the Perfect Mini ITX PC (Part 1): Fractal Design Core 500

November 10, 2020January 1, 2026 Robert Lohr3 Comments

The computer that I bought roughly a year ago has seen quite a few revisions already. But I am not talking about the core hardware – although I switched the GPU at one point. I mean the case. I wanted to go with something small from the start, so the basis is a mini ITX mainboard. However, I have not been incredibly happy with any of the cases so far. In this first installment in a series of several blog posts, one for each computer case, I will share my experiences in building a small, attractive, and performant and yet price efficient computer. I will cover design, hardware compatibility, pricing, and availability. Unlike the YouTube tech creators, not everybody has a seemingly unlimited budget or receives hardware from the manufacturers for review or showcases. It may look easy in all those YouTube videos, but it might not be for everyone.

Although I am mainly talking about gaming hardware, the same thoughts also apply to compact office PCs or workstations. Depending on the use case, i.e., which PC component requires the most focus, one or the other might become less or more relevant. So, first off is the Fractal Design Core 500.

Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order Review

August 22, 2020August 16, 2020 Robert Lohr1 Comment

It was until the end of 2019 when the Star Wars franchise was blessed with another game that truly deserves to be part of the Star Wars universe. The last good Star Wars game I played was Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic – and that was 2004! There were a few others in between and I may have played some. None left a lasting impression though, or otherwise I might still remember bits and pieces of them. And what did players get in recent history? Battlefront is what comes to mind. Well, it may have the Star Wars branding and characters and weapons and sounds. But to me, Star Wars is about a science-fiction fantasy story, a fairy tale if you will. I am not interested in a multiplayer shooter when I think about a Star Wars game. I am interested in an adventure and an adventure is what you get with Jedi Fallen Order. Is it a good adventure? Well, that is what I am here to tell you about.

Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is a story driven, 3rd person action adventure. You play as a young Jedi that is hiding on a scrap planet until one day the Empire arrives and turns his life upside down. From there you fight your way through imperial troops, wildlife, and some zombies. Kind of.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Review

July 30, 2020April 11, 2023 Robert LohrLeave a comment

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is my first Assassin’s Creed ever. The first time I encountered Assassin’s Creed 1 I did not really like the concept. It felt weird to me that the actual interesting and cool gameplay was constantly interrupted by the modern-day stuff. It also did not help the game’s case that the German translation was atrocious. I had to revisit this series a few years later to get more interested. I did so by watching videos on YouTube where all cutscenes had been edited into one large video, effectively turning the game into a movie, sans the gameplay. Ultimately, I have come to like the presentation of the main stories. They are interesting enough and the cutscenes are of very high quality. As a result, I have seen about four or five of these “movies” and watched some gameplay of AC Origins. This really caught my attention and because Odyssey was supposed to be even more like an RPG, I snatched myself a copy once there was a good deal for it. But honestly, given the time I have spent with this game so far, the full price would have been warranted without question. I have finished the game including the DLCs, I am close to 200 hours and I think I am ready to share my thoughts.

How Corona Virus and Lockdown Affect Me

June 28, 2020January 1, 2026 Robert Lohr1 Comment

I guess everybody has a story about how the current situation affects them. Since I share a few of my thoughts on the Internet and this one also has to do with technology, usually the main topic of my musings, I think this is something worth addressing.

I do not know if it makes any difference, but I will say it anyway for the sake of context. I live in Germany and of all the countries in the world we are in fairly good shape so far. We have had lockdown procedures for a while, but nothing so restricting that forbade leaving the house for anything other than going to work, the doctor or buy groceries. We could go for walks or outdoor sports if we were not meeting with other people. It was social distancing, but not hiding at home.

I work as a software developer at an IT company and my employer, like many others, relaxed the usual home office regulations month after month and basically the whole company started to work from their homes, me included. There are a few that do not like it and rather go to the office – which is safe, I presume, as there is basically no one there. I, on the other hand, prefer working from home and this is where the story of this blog post starts.

GTA V: Play Your Own Music Library on Radio

June 5, 2020June 5, 2020 Robert LohrLeave a comment

GTA V was available for free on Epic’s Game store recently and so I snatched a copy. There is the option to listen to your own music as one of the radio stations. Unfortunately, GTA V does not ask you for a location of your music. Instead it expects that you copy the files you want to listen to to a folder in your user directory. Now, although my collection isn’t insanely huge, I still do not want to copy 30 GB of files. There is a better way though, one that I have not found on any other site: A Junction Point.

This is a symbolic link from where GTA V expects the music file to where they are actually located on your computer. This way you are not wasting any space and changes you make to your collection are immediately reflected in the game.

mklink /J "C:\Users\<Your Username>\Documents\Rockstar Games\GTA V\User Music" D:\Music

Remember to use quotes around paths that contain spaces.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: A Reason Not To Play?

May 21, 2020 Robert LohrLeave a comment

The next Assassin’s Creed will let you play as a Viking that is trying to settle in a new world with his tribe. I am genuinely excited about the setting. As a person that likes Metal music, I have certainly come in contact with Norse Mythology by ways of Amon Amarth and other bands. There is also a bit of that in some of the Marvel movies and a lot of that in the Netflix show Vikings.

Now what does that have to do with not wanting to play Assassin’s Creed Valhalla?

It is about the premise. You and your tribe sailing to England and taking land by force. The last part is the important one: “taking land by force”. From what is known about the game at the time of writing this blog post, one central element of the game will likely be that you and your comrades must raid random villages to expand your settlement. That means threatening or even killing innocent people, robbing them of their goods and burning down their houses. You are basically starting a war and civilians will be caught in the crossfire. That is what I have an issue with.

It is a similar experience with the Netflix Vikings show. I am not sure if I should like it or not – ignoring that sometimes it moves very slowly and treads on the brink of utter boredom.

I am not averse to violence in games. Apart from the Anno series and maybe some racing games like Dirt, almost everything I play revolves around violence – now that I think about it… that’s kind of sad. But I do not want to swing the anti-violence Mjölnir and debate whether violence in games is good or bad. I am certainly not that morally correct, at least not in video games. However, there is something about purposefully harming innocent civilians that makes me think twice.

It is too early to know anything for sure and I am basing my opinion on trailers and discussions that you can find on the YouTube. It is just something that came to mind and made me think about it for a moment. It depends on how violence in general, and with regards to the raids in this game in particular, is implemented. I hope it will not just be a mindless slaughter.

The Linux Experiment: One Month Later

April 12, 2020January 1, 2026 Robert Lohr2 Comments

It has been roughly a month since I switched from using Windows 10 as my main operating system to Linux. The reasons for that have all been detailed in The Switching Windows to Linux Experiment blog post. Now I will share a few of the experiences I have made during the first month (it’s been that long already) and what I think about how well it is going.

Let me address the elefant in the room first, the distribution. I think that is likely the first question you, the reader, would ask. The short answer is Pop!_OS by System76.

The Switching Windows to Linux Experiment

March 22, 2020January 1, 2026 Robert Lohr2 Comments

(Beware of the many text)

For the longest time I have been a Windows user. My first computer came with Windows 98 SE (ignoring the Amiga before it) and I’ve used Windows as the main operating system for almost all that time since then. There was a brief excursion into the Apple world for about a year or two, but apart from that: Microsoft’s creation. It’s not that I have not tried using Linux, it’s just that for many years my needs could not be easily satisfied by a Linux based operating system. For one, I have always enjoyed PC gaming and I still do. I’ve tried going with a console, but that was one of the worst decisions I had made in 2019. There also was a long period where I had used my computer as a TV, a time where Youtube and all the other streaming services hadn’t existed. And although I had managed to get the TV tuners to somehow work, it was not comparable to the experience on Windows. For my use case, over all those years, Microsoft’s OS simply was the Vulkan choice. But now in 2020, this isn’t the case anymore. Things have changed, including the maturity of Linux as well as my own needs and my views. Therefore, it’s about time that I revisit this topic.

Benchmark RX 570 vs. RX 5700 XT vs. GTX 1660 Super, Ryzen 2600 OC, 3600MHz RAM

February 14, 2020January 1, 2026 Robert LohrLeave a comment

At the end of last year, I was researching GPUs like a madman, trying to find the best option for price and performance and maybe also have some headroom for a future CPU upgrade. My starting point was a Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GB of 3000 MHz CL15 RAM and an AMD RX 570 with 8 GB of VRAM. A very good performance per buck machine in the summer of 2019 for 1080p gaming. It was purpose-built to be cheap with an upgrade path in the near future. However, my inner hardware enthusiast didn’t want to be content. It also didn’t help that the two games I was playing at that time performed rather poorly (which was the games fault, but you take every excuse you can get to buy new stuff).

Putting that aside, I have data of three graphics cards to compare, tested in four games at three different in-game settings – plus a custom one for two games that I used for playing. In addition to that, I have a bit of CPU overclocking as a result of troubleshooting and a RAM upgrade from a 3000 MHz CL15 kit to a 3600 MHz CL17 kit – which is running at 3400 MHz. More wasn’t possible with this motherboard and CPU. This post isn’t about the CPU overclocking though. I did that to see if the 5700 XT was limited by the R5 2600 and would perform better with a faster CPU. Well no surprise there, but as it turned out, the numbers I found were not caused by the CPU. More on that later.

Far Cry 5 Coop Review

February 9, 2020 Robert LohrLeave a comment

The Far Cry series has been going on for several years now without changing too much of the core game mechanics since the first Far Cry I have played – which was Far Cry 3. What’s new in FC5 is a coop mode that lets you play the main campaign with a buddy. Far Cry 3 had some form of coop as well, but it worked differently by presenting a story unrelated to the game’s single player campaign. I’m not sure how version 4 handled multiplayer, but to my knowledge Far Cry 5 is the first Far Cry to support coop gameplay. It has a few quirks though, which unfortunately still doesn’t make it a 100% coop enabled game. We nevertheless decided to give it a spin and here are my thoughts about the game, its story and gameplay and how the coop experience was.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands – Coop Review

February 1, 2020April 11, 2023 Robert LohrLeave a comment

It was a dark night. Rain was pouring relentlessly from the heavens as a helicopter made its way across the border to Bolivia, going unnoticed against the black clouds. Any of the chopper’s noises were suppressed by the droning rain and constant thunder in the sky. Its destination was a remote location, a secret safe house where an equally secret meeting will be held. The helicopter’s passengers were a group of well-trained covert operatives and their handler. These were the kind of people you only call upon in dire need, when circumstances don’t allow anything other than an elite group of soldiers that can get any job done regardless of difficulty or danger. And all that without ever being noticed. They are effectively ghosts and haunt whomever they have been unleashed on. This time around their target is El Sueño, the biggest and most ruthless drug lord in Bolivia.

And this is where you as the player come in. The story is nothing particularly spectacular, but it provides a good enough canvas for an entertaining open world action game that justifies why you do what you do. I’ve played this game all the way to end in coop mode and this my review of the roughly 75 hours it took.

AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Stuttering at 1080p

December 30, 2019January 1, 2026 Robert LohrLeave a comment

Quick note before I go into any details: I did not find a solution for this problem, unfortunately. I’ll be explaining what happened and show frame time graphs as proof.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get into it. I’m certainly not the only one with this issue. If you employ the search engine of your liking you will find many threads covering that topic (like here and here and here and here and so on). Some managed to get it working, some did not. I’m obviously in the latter category.

What happens? From what I found in my research it seems like the RX 5700 XT GPU aggressively tries to save energy if it is not fully utilized. If you run MSI’s Afterburner or any other monitoring software, then you’ll see the GPU load and frequency being all over the place. In general, this is a good thing – if it does not affect perceived performance. And this is where it fell apart for me.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood – Coop Review

November 19, 2019April 11, 2023 Robert LohrLeave a comment

Wolfenstein Youngblood follows in the same footsteps as its three predecessors that sucessfully revived the series in 2009. Having liked Wolfenstein, The New Order and The New Colossus I thought that sharing that kind of game with a friend in Coop would be even better. This is the first installement in this series that allows you to do that and I’m a big fan of Coop gameplay. And by Coop I mean playing the regular campaign with a fellow gamer, not some unrelated multiplayer map or basic PvP action. I want to experience the story with somebody, have a ton of fun and discuss the game while playing it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

June 22, 2019April 11, 2023 Robert LohrLeave a comment

I’ve been a gamer for a very long time – it’s easily been twenty years or more (yes, I’m old). But, in the past year or so, my excitement has been waning. I have mentioned in another blog post that I was planning to replace my big tower PC with a notebook for (mobile) coding and writing – which I have done – and, in the short- to mid-term, get a gaming console to replace the video gaming part of the PC with something more casual and affordable. This day has finally come and the first game I have played has been Red Dead Redemption 2. Now, this game was many firsts for me:

First non-digital game since Steam has launched. I bought it in a retail store on a BluRay disc.
First full-price video game at 60€. Before that, I have always been shopping for special offers and discounts.
First console game.

I think Red Dead Redemption is something very special and I will try to explain why I think that is. One thing is for sure and that is the fact that it has rekindled the fire within me to play a video game on-end without pause. Unlike the other game reviews/experience reports I have written so far, this one is a bit different. I started writing when I was about 40% through the game and added to it at different stages of progress. In short: it’s like a diary.

The Gameslinger

Enthusiast Gaming

Category: Gaming