Interview With A Gamer – Tom Pedder

Tom Pedder, aka “It's Me” and “Yourself” attended KernowLAN#6, and came through with an excellently PC house in the immense ThermalTake Shark case, a real beast of a case that looks aggressive as hell.

Inside was house the following:

An Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz G0 Stepping CPU, seated on a beautiful ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard next to 4GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM. His graphics power was brought forth from an ASUS 8800GTS, sporting 512MB GDDR3 memory and powered by an Arctic Power 700W PSU. With his Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard disk drive providing 1TB of super fast storage you can see that this PC could kick some pretty fat ass when gaming.

Finally his games were viewed on a big LG W2252TQ 22" TFT.

When someone brings a rig like this to KernowLAN it makes people who know what they're looking at sit up and take notice, which I did. My own PC maybe pretty high spec, and bloody tidy, but Tom's PC put mine to shame.

But did his skills end with picking some good hardware?

Coming 2^nd place in each of the three prize winning tournaments maybe of slight disappointment for Tom, but it proves that while he may not have been the best gamer, he was definitely gamer of the night!

I wanted to ask Tom some questions,

Age:

19

Occupation:

Junior CAD Technician

Home town:

St Austell

Favourite Movie:

Any good Jim Carey movie… Ace Ventura I think.

Favourite Music Band:

Rage Against The Machine

Hobbies/Interests:

Gaming, Rollerblading, mountain biking, Body Boarding

Tom, what is with your gamer tags? (It's Me/Yourself)

The gamer tag “Its Me” was just me being a bit random, no one else that I know of has it as a gamer tag so I thought to myself why not. The gamer tag “Yourself” was originally thought up by me in college when playing a game of Unreal Tournament 2004, I thought it would be hilarious if when I fragged or got fragged the text on screen read “you killed Yourself” and its stuck ever since!

How did you choose the spec for your rig, and did you make any upgrades specifically with KernowLAN in mind?

I made sure that each of the components worked well within itself, so for instance I wouldn’t be running ddr2 ram that could outperform the board it was on (which would mean I wouldn’t be getting the full potential) and generally went for a high end pc. I didn’t bother with SLI as the money spent on this would not be matched by the added performance.

I didn’t update in anyway for KernowLAN although for #7 I am hoping to install water cooling, I will also have two of the Samsung F1 Spinpoints in RAID 0 and maybe a new graphics card.

Have you overclocked you PC in any way?

Not as yet. I’m waiting until I have water-cooling installed.

How much time do you spend playing games on your PC each week and which is your current favourite game?

I would say about 5 hours on average as sometimes I only get to sit down over the weekend. My favourite game right now (thanks to KernowLAN) would have to be Call Of Duty 4, which until last Monday (the K-LAN event) I had never played before! (I came 2^nd in the tournament too).

What upgrade path are you planning to take, and why?

Whatever is for the best really! But I have been told of Intel's new quad core release that they are planning, with 6.00GHz speeds, which will then mean I'm going to be upgrading to a board that supports ddr3 RAM and will go and purchase some of the stuff. Also a new power supply, and then possibly a new graphics card.

What is the one thing you would recommend for any PC user to do to increase their PC's gaming performance?

Graphics isn’t everything, you don’t need the game to look awesome. At K-LAN#5 I was playing on my laptop!

I find that having a powerful processor and a decent hard drive goes along way. Obviously you need some sort of graphics suitable to play the game, and the better the card you have the better the game can look which can help you in most cases considerably, but there is no point having awesome graphics if your pc struggles to run the game itself.

Do you read any specific PC magazines, which ones and why?

I try to get the latest issue available for Custom PC whenever I can. This is as it really is a good source of information for what will be available in the future and what the best at the moment. The guys at Custom PC really do all the leg work for you.

Other magazines I've flicked through, such as pc pro are gimmicky and generally are of little help whatsoever.

If your into PC's and want up to date information go with Custom PC, a gaming PC magazine for gamers with PC's to match!

Do you want to give a shout out to anyone?

Just to one, Matt Marks, where the hell did you go at the beginning of the event - never to be seen again?!

Another BIG thank to all the KernowLAN crew for making these events happen!