Patrick "Burst" Ding
Hardware/Software:
Case: Antec 900
Graphics Card: eVGA 7900GS KO Edition
CPU: Intel E4300 @ 2.7GHz
RAM: 2GB Patriot eXtreme Performance Memory (DDR2 800)
Power Supply: Corsair 520HX
Hard Drive: Samsung SpinPoint T HD501LJ 500GB (7200RPM, 16MB Cache)
Sound Card: SteelSound 5H USB Sound Card
Motherboard: Gigabyte P965-DS3 (rev 3.3)
DVD Burners: Sony/NEC SATA Optiarc AWG170S-B2

Peripherals:
Mouse: Logitech MX518
Keyboard: Microsoft Internet Keyboard (Black)
Mousepad: SteelSeries QcK Heavy
Headphones: Audio Technica AD700
Microphone: Sennheiser PC150
Monitor: CHIMEI 22" LCD Monitor (CMV 221D)

Game and Software Settings
-CS1.6 Settings:
Operating System: Windows Vista
Refresh Rate: 75Hz
Resolution: 1280x960
Sensitivity: 1.28 (360 degree turn on QcK Heavy)
Crosshair: Large, White, Non-Dynamic

-Source Settings: Same as 1.6

-Mouse Settings:
Drivers: None
CPL Mouse Fix: Yes
Windows Sensitivity: 6/11
Enhanced Pointer Precision: No
Launch Options: -w 1280 -h 960 -freq 75 -noforcemparms -noforcemaccel

-Video Card Settings:
Gamma: 1.00
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: 4x
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Image Settings: High Quality




The History

The very first game I ever played was probably Mathblaster or Reader Rabbit on a horridly old computer during grade school. The very first game I played at a home computer was a shareware version of DOOM.

Our family never had very much money to throw around, so we bought console systems instead of constantly upgrading computer parts. My first console system was the Super NES. Some of the games that I distinctly remember playing with my brother are Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat, Total Carnage, Street Fighter 2, and Darius Twin. After the N64/Playstation came out, we got the N64 because we were scared of scratching up the game disks that the Playstation used. On the N64, my favorite games were Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario Kart 64, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

How did I get introduced to CS? The first time I ever played CS was during vacation at Taiwan when I was very very young, probably around 5 or 6 years old. My mom's high-school friend's son had a very good computer for that time and had a whole lot of games, one of which was Half-Life. I'm not entirely sure what beta CS was in--I know it was one of the first ones. The first map I played was cs_assault, camping the CT Tower with an AWP, waiting for the bots to come out of the warehouse. At first, the game was just like any other FPS, but then I found out that you could BUY weapons and complete objectives such as save hostages. This was what captivated me into the game. However, our vacation ended in a few short weeks and I had to go back to America.

The first computer that I "gamed" with was an E-Machine with a 500MB Hard Drive, 128MB (or 256, I don't remember) RAM, and whatever processor was the cheapest at the time (probably Intel Celeron). The internet connection was 56K Dial-Up. The game was Starcraft. Starcraft ran perfectly on this computer, and it was the first game that I strived to become the best at. Since this computer, all of my PC's have been laptops. Every year we bought a new laptop, with a slightly faster processor and slightly more memory. It was one day when I was sitting at our dining room table with one of our laptops that I found out that there was an unsecured internet connection with no password nearby. You can imagine my excitement, coming from a history of dial-up. I tried to connect, but kept getting out of range several times. I spent the next few weeks walking around the dining room table to find the most stable connection.

With this new connection, I went out and bought Counter-Strike (there was a retail version by now). I went home and installed Steam (I missed the 1.5 Era). And now here I am. As I mentioned before, every computer I owned for quite some time had been a laptop. I was playing CS1.6 on the lowest settings on these laptops to get the most FPS I could. The average was around 40fps running around the map. I wanted to try out CS:Source and other games like BF2 and CoD2, so I decided to use my first paycheck to buy a new computer. I also finally decided to buy the cheapest of the DSL's at $15 a month.