Overwatch Community Rallies to Help Gamer Upgrade his Potato PC

Reddit user Snowern posted his Play of the Game on the /r/Overwatch subreddit, showing an impressive gameplay performance using Reinhardt captured on a PC that is pushing the boundaries of minimum requirements well past its due, stating that he runs Overwatch “…on a potato so it’s hard to get a good potg, but when I do it is satisfying”. You can see for yourself what he means from the video below which barely runs the game at 800 x 600 with minimal settings.

Overwatch’s system requirements itself is fairly forgiving, requiring only an i3 with an Intel HD Graphics 4400 integrated IGP; minimum requirements that are quite the potato itself, So let’s see what hardware Snowern is playing with:

Yikes! Well that explains it. He is running an AMD A6-5200 Kabini APU. Kabini APUs were designed to be replaceable alternatives to System-on-Chip low-powered systems (AMD AM1 socket). It could barely run any game when it came out, let alone anything in 2017. It appears to be from a pre-built Gateway system. I don’t even know Gateway sold PCs until Kabini came out. I thought Gateway went out of business in 2011?

Anyway, the good news is that Reddit’s Overwatch community reached out and offered to upgrade their gamer brethren’s system so he can have a better gaming experience. User u/Automationdomination quickly offered to send a GTX 660 while u/Acer589 offered up a more powerful GTX 770 instead. Of course, that required a better power supply so others stepped in to upgrade all the other components as well.

“I honestly didn’t expect this and it’s so amazing that a community would band together like this, I’ve been a part of Reddit for a long time but I’ve mostly been a lurker. Having a community back me up like this even though they don’t know me is just… really nice.”

Snowern was overwhelmed and glad to receive the support from the community. He received upgrades for all his components and now the only thing he requires is an upgrade to Windows 10 which in itself can be a steep price for a college student such as himself but he was happy to purchase it out of pocket and play on an actual game PC.

The actions of the Reddit Overwatch community shows that despite the competitive nature of the game, there are always those willing to lend a hand.