Just venting for the moment

I've been playing Valheim solo for a few months now and I may be the slowest Viking ever. I am now some 970 game days in and I just tried defeating Bonemass and have retreated in frustration. I am taking a time out. I almost had him, about 75% done. I had set up a portal against an outside wall of a nearby crypt and that worked well for awhile for regrouping but eventually he found it and wrecked it. My closest base in a meadow adjacent to the swamp is not far away and I first I was just retrieving the body and immediately suiting up and running back into the fray. It was a war of attrition and I finally had to retire. I still have most, but not quite all, of my stuff. I am wearing 2nd level iron armor and maxed iron mace and maxed round shield. I want to do this with a mace and shield (and the Stagbreaker for the blobs).

I start out the fight well, but as Mike Tyson said, "everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth". My main issue is my PC, an older one I built years ago. My processor is a Phenom II X2 (2 cores) and my video card is a Radeon RX550 with 4 gigs memory, pretty weak. If I have all my graphics at low and turn some of the other features off I am fine in the meadow and black forest. My framerate is not great even then, about 24 fps but playable. But for some reason when I get close to the swamp my frame rate drops much lower and when I was fighting Bonemass it may have been under 5. I can't time his hits, or mine. Sooooo, I am going to build a new PC. I use my game computer as my den media PC and movies and streaming don't stress the system much but it is inadequate for Valheim. I have built around a dozen computers, all but one with AMD CPUs, and I will stay with AMD. I will be building this next one with a Ryzen 5 5600, either the G or X. The G has integrated graphics and the X does not. I prefer the integrated graphics for now because of the extremely high prices of discrete cards and from what I can tell the integrated Vega graphics in the 5600G will still have at least double, and probably more, the ability of the card I have now. Once video card prices drop to a more sane level I will upgrade to a discrete card. I am cautiously confident that even using integrated graphics the better CPU performance and 16 GB of RAM will give me decent frame rates. I can buy a 5600X now, keeping my present video card, but I will wait until August 5th when the 5600G will be released to retail. I hope they are not all bought up by scalpers. So by the second week of August I should be back in the swamp with Bonemass still somewhat depleted.

Until then I will enjoy the game vicariously by keeping up with all y'all's adventures. Skol!