Humanoid

When you said "Obsidian characters" I totally thought you were going to make a Volourn character.

It's something those in long-term guilds may not come to realise for a good while. By late 2005 I'd joined a raiding guild and more or less left the public channels forever. In early 2007 I accidentally ended up co-leading a new guild and became even more isolated from the 'outside', apart from recruiting exercises. It wasn't until about 2011, near the point where I quit for good, that, as an experiment, I started up a new character on a 'local' (i.e. Oceanic) server and went 1-85, somehow never communicating with a single other person. Granted, I didn't even try to talk to anyone myself, but when last in that sort of situation, more than half a decade prior, there'd be no shortage of people initiating some sort of contact (random pop-ups to join someone's random guild don't count). I did more or less zero PvP in my last four years of playing so I can't say anything about that.

So XCOM. I've been meaning to play it a bit before the expansion launches - an intent I've had for some time. Now less than one week out from that date, I finally get around to it. Nothing fancy, standard-settings Classic Ironman, trying to get back into the swing of things - a given since I've not played the game in any real way since December. Things are going well, 100% success, no casualties, through about three months of gametime over about four hours. Then I decide to call it a night, at which point the game terminates abnormally and I find my savegame is nowhere to be found. Ah well, achieved my goals at least, wasn't as rusty as I thought I'd be.

I haven't been subbed to WoW for a year-and-a-half now, but I don't really mind the concept of the new expansion. Time travel is cheesy sure, but it's following up on nine-plus years of cheese anyway. With Burning Crusade back in the day, they tried to incorporate some other design elements into their world, most notably cyberpunk, which they seem to have dropped like a hot potato, but I admit I was one who actually liked that direction - as opposed to the various degrees of conventional fantasy with varying levels of bleakness it's been since (despite a few tangents like Canadian lumberjacks or Indiana Jones). Not that it's any chance of bringing me back. Just that Blizzard is at its worst when trying to be dark, edgy, and well, serious.

Lots to comment on today, heh. On Torment combat - whatever, I want it to be the combatless RPG I've been craving for the past decade plus. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense it's something you need to actively pursue as your preferred approach to a particular issue, as opposed to it being foisted onto you by matter of course. Besides, I don't know anything about Numenera's mechanics (despite having received the sourcebooks as a backer reward), so I have no idea what's suitable. But if I were to generalise, I'd say I prefer turn-based for solo and small-party content, with that preference gradually drifting towards RTwP the larger the party gets. Mainly because I'm too lazy to micromanage large parties (say, 4-6).

It will be interesting to see what they do. All the articles I've read, the developers keep going on about "No Shepard" and about not even including anything about the events from the Shepard trilogy. The first part, I have no issue with. In fact, I think it would be stupid if they did bring Shepard back as a protagonist. The second part, I'm not sure how they can completely and totally ignore/gloss over the events that took place during the trilogy. Prequels are the hip thing now. Or was that reboots?

Looks like they're taking Apple's claim on rounded corners seriously.

Pricing at the usual halo card level, but yeah, disappointed that they didn't release a 6GB version. 3GB at $599 and 6GB for $100-150 more would have made some real options rather than preserving the status quo. I mean it's only $100 less than *two* 290s.

So yeah, it was a good thing that nVidia followed AMD's pricing down. But now they seem to be following AMD's noise levels up - at least if early numbers are to be believed. Still a little longer until the NDA officially lifts, but some publications (*cough* videocardz.com) not bound by NDA have released their numbers. The 780Ti performs as expected (winning at lower resolutions), but its fan runs 5db louder than the Titan and 780 non-Ti coolers. Or rather, it's the same cooler, but forced to run faster to keep the higher-clocked Ti in check. Megahertz wars? Nah, it's the decibel wars! Also, $699, probably. Blah, needed to be $599. EDIT2: $720 at Amazon EDIT: Power consumption figures too

Which is to say, it's designed like WoW quests circa 2005? I might log in for the hell of it once the character name reset kicks in in a few days. Not to play, but to see if I can get any of my original character names back (which they all lost on the automatic transfer to US servers).

That's already more than I clocked up, heh. Been playing next to nothing myself. A bit of the Football Manager 2014 demo - and by "a bit" I mean I chose the "start unemployed" option and during the demo's half-season duration, no one offered me a job.

I was the opposite in that I saw all the YDKJ releases and thought: AWESOME!

Tom's included a section covering performance with an Accelero Xtreme III in their review. The net gain is 13-20% depending on driver version, which is to say, if you take the cost of the cooler into account, it's still cheaper than the 780 at its new price point, and now squashes it in terms of performance.

We'll find out for sure in a day or so, but noises coming out of the tech sites are that the R9 290 samples are performing *faster* than the 290X based on the initial reviews. Explanation is simple enough, the newer drivers they've pushed out have made up more than the difference in hardware. That they've managed to get that performance up so soon after release is good for them, in that without it, the cut-priced GTX780s were occupying the same point on the price-performance curve as the 290X (as in 10% cheaper, 10% slower) while having an actual halfway decent cooler. nVidia would have set their performance target for the 780Ti at just above the level of the 290X on launch. This might make it interesting.

It exists, but only really implemented for mobile platforms. Check nVidia's Optimus which is advertised on most notebooks, and there's an AMD equivalent whose name escapes me - though it's not quite as mature. Hopefully it makes the leap soon, but then again, AMD's performance CPUs still don't have integrated graphics, and neither do Intel's -E CPUs.

Cypress/Northern Islands and Fermi were both 40nm, so the node cadence isn't really that unusual: 28nm debuted with the 7970. But the GPU manufacturers now face competition for access to fabs from the mobile SoC devices, and when faced with the choice of selling to nV/AMD or to Apple (who are looking to shift most of their iPhone silicon away from Samsung for obvious reasons), well, you can guess who has the better influence there. And yeah, while power consumption for a single-GPU card is, I believe, second only to the maligned GTX480, I'd still say it's well within reason. Indeed at with both CPU and GPU at stock clocks, I'd be okay running it off a ~450W PSU. It is, after all, only ~10-20% more than where the previous gen ended up powerwise.

Goes 85% - 89% - 92% - 94% respectively from Bronze to Platinum. Those are minimums. I don't really worry so much about the efficiency as much as the other perks of the higher-end models, so if it covers the nice little conveniences you're after then it's plenty good enough. Talking about stuff like modular cables (which is listed as "hybrid" for the XFX, I guess that means some cables are modular and the essential ones not). What going for an X-series Seasonic got me for example is that it shuts down the fan and operates in passive mode when load is low. A luxury feature, so yeah, perfectly fine going with the Bronze.

Well I did see that the OEM is ATNG from this review. But I'm not familiar with the other models ATNG makes, so it's not overly helpful - the review itself is positive enough but I'm not familiar with the site either. My go to place for reviews of this nature is normally Silent PC Review, who maintain a list of recommended models, though it's admittedly somewhat sparse. EDIT: I should read useful information from my own links. Comprehensive information about OEMs for a massive range of PSUs here.

Not meaningfully so. PSU efficiency operates along a curve. I'm using Wikipedia numbers here, but a gold-certified PSU for example has to be at least 88% efficient at 20% load, 92% efficient at 50% load, and 88% efficient at 100% load. So theoretically you're most economical if you match your average load with the peak in the given PSU's efficiency curve. But as the numbers show there, the difference is bugger-all. It's probably 10W of inefficiency in the worst case scenario. So instead pick based on the tried and true criteria, acoustics. Never heard of the Fractal Design PSU, though it's most certainly not made by them. Most end-user PSUs are rebranded models from a comparatively small pool of OEMs. It gets confusing because different wattages of PSU of the same brand and indeed within the same series can be made by different companies. For example, the Corsair TX650 and TX750 are completely different, one is great and the other mediocre (forget which is which). A search for "Fractal Design Tesla OEM" unfortunately isn't particularly illuminating, so I have no idea how good it is. Personally I always lean towards Seasonic because they're both a premium brand for end users and also an OEM, no rebranding shenanigans going on there. Seasonic also make units for, among others, Antec, Corsair, Coolermaster and XFX amongst others. There's a partial list of models by OEM here. Copied a snippet to show how ridiculous it can get: Silverstone Element ST60EF 600W – made by Enhance Silverstone Element ST65EF 650W – made by Seventeam Silverstone Element ST70EF 700W – made by FSP

Haswell will overclock to a lower frequency than Sandy did - don't be surprised if you only yield low-to-mid 4s instead of the high 4s. But it's okay in that the architectural improvements means the lower clocked Haswell is still faster. I think I mentioned in the other thread that the pick for silent CPU air cooling was the Thermalright Macho 2, but it's somewhat hard to find. The newish Scythe Mugen 4 looks good, and should be available in Europe (as opposed to America where apparently they have no current distributor). Oops, didn't read your link before posting the above. Yes, get the Mugen 4. The heatsink itself is as good as any single-tower design, and the included fan is very good. It certainly won't limit Haswell overclocking - which is limited by one thing and one thing only: Intel's cost-cutting decision to use crappy thermal paste which is bonded poorly between the heatspreader and the CPU die. They did the same thing with Ivy too, as opposed to Sandy which was soldered onto its heatspreader. The sad thing here is it means temperatures of Haswell are about 20°C higher than they need to be purely because it saves Intel a buck (or probably less, even) per CPU.

Not really an interesting picture, but I finally got done installing the new parts so I took a picture of it. Cool that the fans are captured looking like they're totally still there, the PC is well and truly on. I took the opportunity to remove the pointless 120mm fan that's in the middle of the PSU + HDD chamber. Not like a single 5400rpm HDD and two SSDs actually need any cooling. The only other modification of note is that the exhaust fan at the top of the case is not there. I removed it when initially building this system and blocked off the grille with some crappy foam taped onto the top of the case. Oh, and that hard drive just sitting there is my old one, connected while I pick and choose which of my old files are worth keeping. I mean it's an 800GB hard drive and I have a 4TB now, so I could just copy the lot over (it's pretty much full), but eh, it's spring so I might as well do some spring cleaning.

PSU is easily enough, yes.

Well, if the case is tall enough to fit an internal radiator for a water-cooling system, I'd imagine it's tall enough for a standard 120mm tower heatsink. But yes, do check, not only the height, but also whether any potential overhang might interfere with your RAM modules. (Tall memory heatspreaders should be banned! Banned, I tell you!) P.S. Almost all tower heatsinks come with a crappy stock fan, so expect to spend another $10-15 on a good one if you turn out to be unsatisfied with the stock one. That said, they're probably no worse than the ones that cool your current radiator. The exceptions are Scythe and Noctua, which is to be expected since they also make the best stand-alone fans. (And yeah, I have a Megahalems too, but it was more due to availability than specific choice. My personal pick in terms of absolutes would be the stupidly named Thermalright HR-02 Macho. But rationally the direct-contact smaller models are fantastic value - either the Coolermaster 212 or Silverstone AR-01. The latter is marginally better but also a bit dearer.)

I would both hope and expect $450 for the 290, which indeed is a Tahiti with a few units disabled. And there's very little doubt that it'll be the best buy of any performance card until the 20nm generation hits in a year's time. The 770 is completely irrelevant. Not just after these new launches, but that it always has been irrelevant - it's asking for $100 more than the 280X/7970GE, which it is beaten by. And that $100 when we're talking ~$300 cards means more than $100 when comparing ~$600 cards. Actually I'll go a step farther and say that with the 7950 being cleared out for less than $200, everything up to the $400 mark is currently irrelevant. The 290's competition is the standard 780 (non-Ti). The 780 will either take a price cut from its current $650 SRP (since the 780Ti has been announced at that price), or it will be discontinued, so who knows - but it's hard to see nV dropping it to $450 all the same. That said, I don't think the cards are "meant" to be used for any particular resolution. The superiority at higher resolutions is a quirk of AMD's design (probably the 512-bit bus width primarily), but that means the 290 will have a proportionally identical gain when moving up to 4k. And while they do passably at that resolution, I don't think any graphics card in the world can be said to perform well enough for 4k gaming. I mean check out Anandtech's numbers in the OP for example. It takes *two* 290X cards to hit 60.0fps in Crysis 3, at medium quality and FXAA (cheap AA). Two Titans, for what it's worth, manage only 37fps. 4k is just flat out not game-ready.

Huh, is it one of those all-in-one watercooling kits like the Corsair H50 or the Antec Kuhler? Almost sounds as if there's a fault with it. Not a fan of these units in general, it's almost as if they exist purely for people to be able to claim they're water cooled - a shallow claim indeed when they're outperformed in both temperature and acoustics by traditional air cooling. But that's a personal gripe of mine, and unrelated to the fact it should be working far, far better than it is. Could be anything from a faulty pump to a simple crack in the plastic retention mechanism. I mean to a certain degree you get some flow through convection, which explains why it's not immediately shutting down (which would be the case if you had an unconnected waterblock installed, or even a small fanless heatsink). But yeah, at the cost of spending some cash I'd rather just ditch that thing and go for an entry level tower cooler which will be better in almost all regards.