All Posts by CleffyII

The best AGP card you can get is the HD2600.  Anything higher hits the bandwidth limit of the AGP slot.

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

Looks like a lot of cuts of phrases said BEFORE the current presidential campaign. All of it is irrellevent, why would the democrats want McCain to win when they have a Democrat kicking ass already.

Uhh its the most relevant when its before the current presidential campaign.  Everyone knows all the candidates are lying thier teeth off to be elected president.  The only true grade to test a candidate on how they will be when they are president is from thier previous action before the current presidential campaign.

The Inquirer was actually right.  Wow thats rare.

Rescent sound blasters have been of bad quality so it wouldn't be surprising if it was fried.  Thats all I think it can be with the way the sound is working.  It doesn't really sound like a missing sound codec or a problem playing mono-sounds.

The 9800 GTX+ was intended to beat the ATI offerings this last june and has a marginal jump in performance.  However, the 4850 simply trounces it.  It is above any 8800 but below the GTX 200s and HD4800's.  Its also priced higher then the HD4850 which outperforms it by a notable margin.

The 9800 Black Edition just has an unlocked overclocking features.  The 9800+ is fabricated at a smaller die size.

Publishers I can think off the top of my head with offices in the US.

• Electronic Arts
• Vivendi
• NCSoft
• Moby Games
• THQ
• Microsoft
• Sony
• Sony Online Entertainment
• Atari
• Midway Games
• Activision
• Acclaim
• Capcom
• Bandai/Namco
• Nintendo
• Square-Enix
• Gravity LLC.
• K2 Networks
• Spark Unlimited
• GPotato
• nDoors
• Nexon
• Webzen
• Aeria Games
• Sega
• 2K Sports

Right now games are designed for at most 2 cores, games are starting to become more multi-core and in the near future there is the possibility of middle-ware engines using more then 2 cores.  Most mmos are designed for single core, and usually when a game is early in its release/beta you have to set its affinity to 1 core or face a threading swap crash/memory leak.

Having 2 cards in SLI that each have 1 gig, there will only be 1.5 GB ram left on Vista 32.  There is a use for more ram.  1st is so you can have atleast 4 gigs system memory.  Also you will get a performance boost if your system can hold the entire application in system memory.

Wow lots more explorers then I thought.  I am also one who likes to explore but have found most rescent games don't allow this aspect or have nothing worth exploring for.  The only one that comes to mind is Guild Wars that had some nice areas to explore, and out of the mission instances you can go into your own personal instance of the world and discover those little waterfalls in the middle of no where.  Or get a party and stomp the level 30 dragon boss on these explorable maps with a party even though you can only get to level 20.

Victory!!!.  Now we need FFXIII with a PC port and the PC will reign supreme.

Its not an easy shader to pull off because doing the inking usually has a personal touch to it.  There is that new MadWorld game coming out that does a descent inking shader.

Memememememe.

I have experience working on 3D apps since 2004, and have had extensive level design experience since then too.  I also have held a position as a level designer at a company working for free.    Unfortunetly I have no examples of my level design work that I am allowed to show, but I can whip something up in the next week.  I will also be in the Chesapeake area from August 15th-August 19th.  I live in San Diego but I am vacationing there.

AION will probably the best mmo you will play with this theme.  Atleast NCSoft is going all out to make this game great.

I recommend waiting until Nahelhiem releases before getting a new motherboard if you can stand the wait.  The reason being that its a completely new architecture which requires a whole new motherboard design.  You probably won't be able to fit it in a Socket 775 board.  If you buy now chances are you won't have an upgrade future. 

On GPUs, most mmos do not support crossfire/sli.  However, in the future there are mmos coming based on the Unreal 3 and Crytek engine that does support multi-gpu setups.  I recommend the HD4870 over the GTX 280.  The performance difference isn't actually that different between the 2, however the HD4870 is much cheaper and draws less power on average.  You probably would have a tough time SLIing 2 GTX280 without atleast a 1000watt PSU.

If your getting an Intel Mobo I suggest Gigabyte.  The last slew of MSI intel boards have had issues.

Ram is incredibly cheap now.  You can get 4 gigs (2x2GB) OCZ DDR2 with 4-4-4-17 timing at $60 after mail-in rebate.

In HD setup, I would get 3 HDD if you want the most speed.  1 80gig for OS, and 2 320GB in Raid 0 for apps.  Maybe another 1 for storage.  750 gigs has started to become affordable with Samsung SP1, however, I think you will have a difficult time filling more then 100 gigs.

With the PSU you will need a pretty high wattage one if you want to crossfire the HD4870 or GTX 280, as well as more then 1 HDD.  The HD4870 draws 285watts underload and the GTX 280 draws 310 watts underload.  You are also looking at a 140watt CPU and probably around 300watts for other components.  Thats around 1060 watt draw with SLI, around 1010 watt with crossfire.  Getting a good quality PSU is also important.  These cost around $300.  For brands I suggest Thermaltake or Tagan's new ABS BZ series Piperock PSUs.  I just got a new 800w Piperock PSU and it looks really cool.

On Optical Drives, you can probably get a Blu-Ray Drive.   They have gone down considerably in price, and some Blu-Ray readable drives are selling in the $145 range.  While Blu-Ray writable drives are in the $300 range.

On Cases, you probably should get a big case for cooling.  I am personally impressed with Thermaltakes new Armor and Xaser VI cases as well as thier Mozart Cube Case.  I also like the new Antec 1200 case.  Then ofcourse there is Lain-li.

Its a 32-bit OS so it only supports around 3.5GB.

The big announcement is the Star Craft 2 Demo.  WAR is hardly newsworthy enough for fileplanet to make a big deal about it.

The most important hardware for gaming is the video card followed by the processor.  I would recommend aiming to get an HD4870 and an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400.  Both these parts should run around $450 and will run all games currently out on thier highest settings.

What else you get really will only effect gaming performance by about 10%, you can cheap out on the motherboard, ram, hard drives, optical drives, and operating system.  A good PSU that runs in the range of $100+ is recommended though so you don't get power failures or surges.

I like Dr.Pepper, Coke, Coffee, and Water.

This isn't like the US where we have to send troops 10k miles to deal with it, its a more local thing.  I believe they will handle it the same way the filipino's handled the Taliban in the Philipines.  Send specially trained soldiers to the area and kill/capture every single person in the area.

I doubt it will be able to crossfire with a 580w power supply.  The 3870 was one of the lowest power consuming video cards in some years and they recommend a 550w power supply to crossfire them.  I would imagine you would need atleast a 650w supply to crossfire the 4850.

Originally posted by Vint4ge

Originally posted by CleffyII

Originally posted by Vint4ge

Originally posted by CleffyII

If you going to get a machine through iBuyPower, CyberPower, or thier other brand I recommend getting it through newegg.  Newegg is more likely to honor a warranty then going through the company directly.  HP is also good on the price to performance ratio.  Here are some recommendations.  The only thing I don't like are the video cards.  It would be nice if there were some HD4800's which would be priced around the same but outperform the cards on these machines.

• 4GB Intel E8400 w/9600GT $899.99
• 4GB Phenom 9850 w/9600 GT $899.99
• 4GB Intel Q9300 w/8800GT $999.99
• 4GB Intel E8500 w/9600GT $1,049.99
• 4GB Phenom 9850 w/9800 GTX $1,119.99
• 6GB Phenom 9850 w/9800 GT $1,129.99
• 4GB Intel Q9450 w/9800GTX $1,449.99
• 4GB Intel Q9300 w/8800GT $1,499.99
• 8GB Intel Q9300 w/9800GT $1,529.99

If you want Quality, then you are gonna have to spend some cash.  Some good quality builders are Falcon Northwest and VoodooPC.

 

If 8GB Intel Q9300 w/9800GT $1,529.9 isn't quality enough for you, wow? That thing is pretty powerful. And I'm 100% sure you can build your own rig just like that for less.

EDIT: Falcon Northwest and VoodooPC - definitely expensive.

 

It isn't about the power but the value.  It also has 1TB of storage and a blu-ray drive.  For about $800 I can make a better performing PC.  But that all comes down to if you have the savvy to build it.

If your interested in building it yourself, you can move in smaller steps.  I started to learn how to build my own PC by getting a Bare-Bones kit and adding in the parts it didn't have.

 

Where do you get your parts from? I'd be very interested to see how you can build a more powerful machine at only $800.

I only said better performing, so I would target performance first.  Which is pretty much only an E8400 ($170) and HD4xxx series card ($170-$289).  With that minimum it will outperform the $1500 machine in most everything except for processor intensive tasks that make use of more then 2 cores in which case using a phenom would be more ideal.