There’s only one thing to do when you have money to burn and a serious thing for racing games: buy some gloves and build yourself a killer five-screen PC gaming rig.
Contrary to what you may have heard, PC gaming is not all that terribly expensive. Unless you’re Chad Smith, that is, and you’ve decided that the only way to satisfy your virtual racing jones is to build a killer five-screen rig that makes you feel like you’re sitting behind the wheel of a screaming 600 horsepower Corvette C6.R. That probably costs some bucks.
The bulk of his gaming rig is impressive but not all that ridiculously overpowered. He’s rocking an Intel E8400 CPU with a VisionTek 6870 Eyefinity 6 and 4GB of RAM, a solid but not breathtaking build; what makes it noteworthy are the five Dell 23″ LCD monitors attached to it and arranged like racecar windows, a Logitech G27 force-feedback racing wheel with chilicoke adapter and Momo MOD 78 racing wheel, a Frex Shift+ sequential shifter and an iPhone running iRaceDash mounted to the wheel, feeding him real-time race data. Tying it all together is iRacing, a hyper-realistic online multiplayer racing sim.
[If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because of last year’s story about the iRacing World Champion who took a real race car out for the first time ever and absolutely nailed it, even though he ended up puking in his helmet.]
The results, as you can see in this YouTube video recorded with a GoPro head-mounted camera, are spectacular. Amazingly, aside from one or two quick glances, only three of the five screens are visible, yet it’s still almost indistinguishable from the real thing, especially after you’ve stared at it for a few minutes. Another video, posted in November, shows off Smith’s rig in a different kind of racing with Richard Burns Rally 2011.
I am, of course, intensely jealous. Love those gloves, though.
via: Tecca
Published: Dec 16, 2011 08:15 pm